Chalkbeat

Chicago student homelessness is rising. Could a tax change backed by the mayor help fix that?

2024-03-14T19:55:36+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news.

Derrianna Ford lived with her grandmother on Chicago’s north side growing up, but when the older woman lost her home, Ford and her siblings had to relocate to the south side for about a year.

They moved from the city’s West Ridge neighborhood to the South Side during her freshman year at Mather High School. Ford said she had to wake up at 4 a.m., take a bus to the southernmost stop on Chicago’s Red Line, ride almost the entire 26-mile route north, and then get on another bus in order to get to school by 8 a.m.

During the week, she would occasionally stay with a friend closer to school to avoid the long commute.

“This is so normal to us,” Ford said. “You don’t see yourself as struggling because you’re used to it. You don’t see it as homelessness.”

These days, Ford, now 20, is searching for a place of her own. But she has another goal. She’s knocking on doors to help pass a ballot referendum in Chicago on March 19 that advocates say could put a real dent in reducing homelessness.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer and middle school teacher, promised in his education platform and transition plan to house the city’s homeless, with a focus on more than 20,000 students in Chicago Public Schools currently facing housing instability. In the last year, the number of CPS students in unstable housing situations — which can disrupt or derail students’ academic progress — has risen by roughly 50%.

To address that, Johnson and his allies are pushing to increase a real estate transfer tax on sales of property sales worth more than $1 million to generate an estimated $100 million annually to fund services for the homeless and affordable housing.

Some progressive groups, including the Chicago Teachers Union which helped propel Johnson to office, have been advocating to increase the city’s real estate transfer tax to help the homeless since Rahm Emanuel was mayor. The effort — dubbed Bring Chicago Home — is something Johnson emphasized often on the campaign trail last year.

“The people of Chicago voted for me because I said that I’m going to address homelessness,” Johnson said Wednesday. “Bring Chicago Home is an opportunity to address homelessness.”

A document obtained by Chalkbeat outlining Johnson’s first-term goals suggested his administration hopes to help house 10,000 students and their families.

But opponents of the initiative challenged the ballot question’s legality in the courts, even asking the Illinois Supreme Court to block the measure, which the court declined to do Wednesday. Still, some groups, including the nonpartisan budget watchdog Civic Federation, are concerned the mayor and City Council have not been specific enough about how the money would be used.

“This is the mayor’s signature item,” said Ald. Brendan Reilly, who represents much of downtown and opposes the referendum because it lacks specifics and could have unintended consequences on rental property and commercial real estate. “He’s put a lot of political capital into it and right now the Chicago electorate gets to give him a report card. I think this is as much about the policy as it is about a commentary on his agenda.”

Chicago Public Schools would not directly get any of the estimated $100 million in revenue that a change to the real estate transfer tax would generate. CPS officials did not comment on the ballot initiative, but said the district will continue to support homeless students and protect their rights under federal law.

More Chicago Public Schools students identified as homeless

The number of students in temporary living situations enrolled at Chicago Public Schools has hovered around 5% for at least the last decade — twice the national average. Recent data indicates the problem is getting more acute as the numbers climb.

District data shared with Chalkbeat from the end of February indicated 21,855 students currently enrolled at CPS were considered Students in Temporary Living Situations, or STLS. That’s up from more than 14,317 such students last February. CPS data includes any student categorized this way at any time during the school year, and once a student is marked as such, they keep that status for the remainder of the year.

The vast majority — around 16,000 students — are classified as “doubled up,” meaning they are living with another family temporarily, like Ford was while a freshman in high school.

But the number of CPS students listed as living in a shelter, hotel or motel, or living out of a car, park, or other public place more than tripled in the last year — from about 2,000 last February to nearly 8,000 as of Feb. 29. The jump has coincided with the ongoing influx of migrants arriving from the southern border.

Chicago grappled with students facing homelessness or housing instability long before the COVID pandemic and recent wave of migrants. A 2021 study from the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab analyzed nine years of district data between 2009 and 2018 and found that, over the course of their K-12 experience, about 13% of CPS students experienced housing instability.

The report noted that research shows homeless students come to school less often, have lower academic achievement, and are more likely to drop out. At the same time, school districts like CPS “have limited capacity to connect students to housing supports.”

Cook County Commissioner Tara Stamps, the daughter of a longtime housing activist, saw this “heartbreaking” reality up close during the more than two decades she spent as a classroom teacher, including working alongside Johnson at a school serving the Cabrini Green public housing complex.

One time, she said, a single mom of one of her students had no place to stay, so Stamps and the school’s security guard “called and called and called around” to help them find housing.

Stamps, who now also works for the Chicago Teachers Union, said past administrations have emphasized academic achievement and improving test scores without prioritizing the conditions students faced that affected those scores: “There is no [academic] progress … if a baby doesn’t know where they’re going to sleep at night, if they don’t know where they’re going to eat.”.

Federal law requires school districts to support students facing housing insecurity. Some districts also get money through competitive grants to support homeless students. Students identified as such are entitled to transportation, the right to enroll without a permanent address, and the right to continue attending the same school through the end of the academic year even if they move.

But few districts have been directly involved in finding families housing.

With the help of federal COVID money, some schools across the country have added staff to help families with housing, others have provided emergency hotel stays and even propped up shelters inside schools.

Alyssa Phillips, an education attorney with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which has been advocating for Bring Chicago Home for several years, said the city needs a consistent revenue stream to tackle homelessness, along with input about what works from people experiencing homelessness and service providers.

“I think the most important thing is having that continuous funding,” Phillips said.

Federal COVID money for homeless set to expire

During the COVID pandemic, housing instability rose across the country. Homeless students were disconnected from schools and districts struggled to identify how many students were entitled to additional support and resources.

Chicago Public Schools received about $10.1 million in federal pandemic aid to serve homeless students, as part of roughly $800 million distributed nationally to states and school districts.

The city and school district created a program to give $500 stipends to families in Students in Temporary Living Situations, using money from the initial 2020 wave of federal COVID relief dollars. It’s not clear how many families received the money, and district officials deferred to the city, which administered the program.

Ald. Maria Hadden, who represents Chicago’s north lakefront and is a supporter of the Bring Chicago Home initiative, said the city also used some of its share of federal COVID dollars to provide rental assistance to thousands of people. She recounted helping one family in her ward with a CPS student with epilepsy avoid an eviction because they were able to get six months of rental assistance.

But soon, federal COVID money is drying up. Expenditure data obtained by Chalkbeat shows most of the school district’s share of federal COVID money has been spent, primarily for school staff.

If the ballot initiative to raise the real estate transfer tax on property over a $1 million is approved, Hadden said, the city could revive, continue, or expand pandemic-era programs, like rental and mortgage assistance and rapid rehousing efforts for people living in tent encampments.

Mayor Brandon Johnson is greeted by supporters after he spoke while dozens rally for the Bring Chicago Home resolution outside the Thompson Center before a City Council meeting on Nov. 7, 2023.

Political ‘slush fund’ or nimble revenue stream?

Ford and others continue to knock on doors to garner support from voters who will ultimately decide whether Chicago should have a graduated real estate transfer tax.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union is gearing up for another round of contract negotiations with a mayor more amenable to their views than his two predecessors. During contract negotiations in 2019, the union pushed to include provisions around affordable housing. But then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the union contract was “not the appropriate place for the City to legislate its affordable housing policy.”

Leaked contract proposals for upcoming contract talks include two focused on affordable housing: mortgage and rental assistance for teachers, and a vocational program that would have students build affordable housing.

Whatever happens with the teachers union contract, Johnson is forging ahead with a plan to borrow $1.25 billion dollars to fund affordable housing and other development. On Wednesday, the mayor said he’ll soon name a new chief homelessness officer. And he directed the city’s Department of Family Support Services to work with CPS to match the district’s most vulnerable students with housing. The two agencies meet weekly, a spokesperson confirmed.

If voters approve the ballot initiative, the City Council would still need to pass an ordinance spelling out how to appropriate the revenue.

Reilly, the downtown alderman, said that “anyone who has a soul” cares about the homeless and wants to find solutions. But he worries that if the tax is approved, the revenue could quickly turn into a “slush fund” for political allies of whomever is mayor.

“There’s no guarantee that any of this money lands with helping the homeless people,” Reilly said. “It’s just going to be a big stack of money that a whole lot of people are gonna wanna fight over.”

Emma Tai, campaign director for the Bring Chicago Home Ballot Initiative, said the revenue would be legally dedicated to fund affordable housing and services for the homeless. A draft ordinance for implementing the change to the transfer tax would create a 15-member panel appointed by the mayor and approved by City Council to make recommendations annually based on the “most pressing needs.”

“The idea is for the funds to be nimble,” Tai said, noting that during the height of the pandemic, there was a critical need to provide housing to domestic violence victims, whereas now that pandemic-era eviction moratoriums have ended, there’s a need for emergency rental assistance. The idea is that the panel’s recommendations would take such shifts into account.

For young people like Derrianna Ford, who experienced housing insecurity as a student and is searching for an affordable apartment now, the issue boils down to one thing: “stability.”

This story has been updated to more accurately characterize Tai’s comments about how housing needs have shifted in Chicago.

Chalkbeat reporter Reema Amin contributed reporting.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Grocery cards and car repairs: How COVID aid changed the way schools can help homeless kids

2024-03-14T21:15:14+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Mollie Eppers tried for years to give students experiencing homelessness prepaid grocery cards that would allow their families to shop for food.

But the student services specialist in Juneau, Alaska, couldn’t devise a system that would satisfy the spending rules for both her local school district and the federal program that helps homeless students.

So when Congress sent schools COVID aid for homeless students with fewer restrictions, Eppers knew her first order of business: Get the grocery cards.

She found a local Safeway that accepted prepaid cards, then bought them in bulk. Families can get $100 to $200 cards at a time, depending on how many kids they have. The aid has made it easier for families sleeping in their cars or who don’t have a stove to choose foods they can eat. That’s been especially helpful as Alaska works through a huge backlog of applications for food benefits that left many families waiting months to get aid.

The Juneau School District in Alaska purchased $25,000 in grocery cards to help students experiencing homelessness buy food.

“It’s been a lifesaver,” said Eppers, who’s spent $25,000 on grocery cards so far, and plans to buy more. “They don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Across the country, Eppers and other school staff are doing things to help homeless students that they’ve never been able to before. That’s in part due to the size of the aid package. But it’s also because federal education officials said explicitly that schools could spend this money on items like prepaid store cards, gas cards, and cell phones that schools were often reluctant to buy in the past for fear of running afoul of various spending and record-keeping rules.

That’s meant more schools are providing families with direct aid that allows them to choose which foods, clothing, and other supplies will best meet their children’s needs. It’s one more way that schools have stretched beyond their typical roles and used pandemic assistance to help families in dire straits in new ways.

But schools might stop doing this soon — unless federal officials spell out that other funds can be used like this, too.

“You can provide somebody a pair of shoes, but if you say: ‘Here’s a store card, pick out the shoes for your child that your child will wear,’ there is a sense of dignity, and there’s also a sense of agency,” said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, which recently gathered data on how often schools are spending COVID aid in this way. “And what that has translated to is trust and engagement. A store card is much more than a store card.”

Schools used to face more limits on helping students

In a survey of more than 1,400 school liaisons earlier this school year, SchoolHouse Connection found that 40% had purchased gas cards for families and 34% had bought store cards. That was double the share who planned to purchase cards when the nonprofit did a similar survey in 2021.

“These unusual uses may be the very ones that are the most impactful and strategic in meeting broader goals of increasing enrollment, attendance, and performance,” the report concludes.

In Washington state, one liaison said gas cards were now among the top-requested forms of assistance by families. The offering made families feel heard and open to more collaboration, the liaison wrote on the survey.

In Rhode Island, another liaison said that it had been a “huge plus” to give families store cards so they could buy sneakers and underwear. “I would argue that being able to make their own selections is better for the kids, physically and emotionally,” the liaison wrote.

In the past, some schools did provide this kind of assistance to homeless students. But Duffield said it often boiled down to a judgment call.

The federal education law that outlines the rights of homeless children, the McKinney-Vento Act, says that schools can provide “extraordinary or emergency assistance” to make sure homeless kids can attend school and participate in school activities.

While some schools interpreted that to include prepaid store cards, many other districts or states didn’t allow schools to buy store cards. Officials worried about how they would show the cards benefitted a particular student, Duffield said, and some feared giving away prepaid cards could be ripe for misuse or fraud — a long held, and often misplaced, complaint among critics of public assistance programs.

For that reason, Duffield and others are calling on the federal government to issue guidance saying that schools can use McKinney-Vento funding in the same ways that were permissible with the COVID aid.

“Having clear federal guidance saying that you can, that then shapes what a state allows,” Duffield said. Getting something in writing is key, because many school business officers will ask: “Where does it say that?”

How cell phones and car repairs help students

Still, school liaisons like Eppers say they’re taking lots of precautions. The grocery cards Eppers hands out to families don’t allow for the purchase of alcohol or tobacco, and she locks up the cards in her office to keep them safe. Families have to sign for each grocery card, too.

“I don’t want anything to come between my ability to provide that to the students,” she said.

In the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, Claire Bergman used COVID aid to buy five cell phones with internet hotspots for homeless teens who live on their own without the support of their parents. Each month, the Sun Prairie Area School District pays their phone bills.

The new initiative has helped social workers stay in touch with students who tend to move around a lot and may be parents themselves. That’s helped ensure their ride to school shows up in the right place and that students are connected with child care.

The phone hotspots enable unaccompanied teens to use the internet on their school-provided Chromebooks, so they can do their homework wherever they’re staying. And the district also allows the teens to download certain social media apps so they can stay in touch with classmates — an added benefit for kids who often feel isolated from their peers.

“The phones have really opened up lines of communication and supported attendance efforts,” Bergman said. That success has helped Bergman make the case the district should keep paying for cell phones when the COVID aid is gone.

“Our business office has been really open to exploring different opportunities and understanding the connection piece of the phones,” she said. “Once these funds run out, it will be a little bit more of a: ‘Is this really a priority?’ question.”

In North Dakota’s Bismarck Public Schools, COVID relief funding has allowed Sherrice Roness to make more “outside the box” purchases that she is hoping to continue, too.

With COVID aid, the district now covers up to $500 in critical car repairs, such as fixing brakes or power steering. It’s a strategy advocates for homeless youth say can be more cost-effective than paying for a bus pass or taxi, and it has the added benefit of helping families get to work and doctor’s visits, in addition to taking their children to school.

“It gives them that pride of: They’re able to do that — provide that normalcy for their kids,” Roness said.

Roness has also paid for children’s medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when a family’s insurance has lapsed, and she purchased a post office box so a 17-year-old who was no longer living with her parents could still get her college and financial aid letters in the mail.

When unique needs like that pop up, Roness said, it’s made a big difference to be able to tell students: “You know what? I can help you with that.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools scale back home internet help as remote learning fades

2022-09-27T04:01:00+00:00

With students off Zoom and back in classrooms, many schools have stopped helping students get online at home, new federal data shows.

Just 45% of public schools are providing home internet access to students who need it this school year, down from 70% earlier in the pandemic, according to August survey data released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The sharp decline in schools giving students Wi-Fi hotspots or covering the cost of home internet coincides with the end of widespread remote learning, first caused by school closures then by COVID quarantines. Yet even with schools fully reopened, students still are likely to need home internet for homework, sick days, temporary school shutdowns, virtual tutoring, and parent-teacher conferences.

And while home internet and device access expanded during the pandemic, 1 in 4 low-income families still did not have broadband internet at home a year after schools shut down, according to a 2021 survey. Instead many students had to put up with frustratingly slow internet speeds or work on their phones.

As recently as this spring, about a quarter of teenagers living in very low-income households said they sometimes can’t complete their homework because they don’t have reliable computer or internet access.

“I think there’s an inaccurate belief that more students and families actually have connectivity than actually do,” said D’Andre Weaver, chief digital equity officer at Digital Promise, a nonprofit focused on expanding student access to high-speed internet.

Weaver suspects that schools’ retreat from home internet assistance also reflects a new wariness of online learning based on the negative experiences had by many families and educators during the pandemic. But he argues that schools should try to improve online learning and expand internet access rather than turn away.

“Now it’s like, ‘Let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater,’” he said. “And that’s the wrong viewpoint.”

Just over 900 public schools participated in the survey, which was conducted August 9-23.

While less than half of schools said students will be provided with internet at home, 56% said students can get online at other locations, such as public libraries. Laptops and tablets appear to be much more readily available, with 94% of schools saying that students who need a digital device this academic year will be provided one.

Funding is another likely factor in schools’ scaling back support for home internet access. The federal stimulus money that school districts used to pay for hotspots and free internet plans is drying up, forcing schools to find other funding if they want to keep providing assistance.

Also, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed last year included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides a monthly subsidy to help low-income families pay for internet service. Several major internet providers agreed to lower their prices so that the subsidy — up to $30 per month for most eligible households — would cover the full cost of a high-speed internet plan.

In a sense, the federal program removes schools as intermediaries by giving the internet subsidy directly to families. However, advocates say that schools still must support families who haven’t enrolled in the program or aren’t eligible.

New Jersey parent Nadirah Brown said she earns too much to receive the new subsidy but not enough to pay her more than $100 monthly internet bill without cutting other expenses.

“For the parents who don’t qualify, there is no program available for them,” she said, whose daughter is an eighth grader in a Newark public school.

The school lent her daughter a laptop and offered a Wi-Fi hotspot during remote learning, Brown said. But it did not offer either device this school year, even as teachers continue to assign homework that must be submitted online through Google Classroom, she added.

“It’s definitely still needed whether they’re working virtually or not,” she said about home internet.

A Newark Public Schools spokesperson did not immediately respond to emailed questions Monday.

In Newark, like many other cities, high-speed internet is widely available. The main problem is that many families cannot afford it, said Ronald Chaluisán, executive director of the Newark Trust for Education, a nonprofit whose mission includes promoting equitable internet access.

While they could benefit from the new federal subsidy, Chaluisán said many families are not aware of it. (Nationwide, less than 25% of eligible families enrolled in a previous iteration, called the Emergency Broadband Benefit.) Some families also struggle to complete the multi-step enrollment process, said Chaluisán, whose organization is partnering with the nonprofit Project Ready to spread awareness about the subsidy program.

He added that one lesson of remote learning is that every student needs a computer and internet access at home.

“They’re not luxury items,” he said. “They’re just necessities.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Clock is ticking for NYC families: Millions in pandemic food benefits may expire next month

2024-01-22T19:09:20+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

Leer en español

Millions of dollars in unused NYC pandemic food benefits could begin to expire in February, as the deadline for families to use them rapidly approaches.

The funds — known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer, or P-EBT — were sent to all New York City public school families in several rounds over the past four years. They’re intended to help cover costs for meals that would ordinarily be provided at school.

Last year, the state distributed multiple rounds of the benefits, including $120 per child for the summer of 2023, as well as at least $391 per child for the summer of 2022 and the 2021-22 school year. (Funds from the latter disbursement could total as much as $1,671 per child based on COVID-related absences or remote-learning days during the year.)

Now, the latter of these funds are set to expire for families who have not used them.

David Rubel, an education consultant who has followed the food benefits closely, fears thousands of families may soon lose benefits they’re not even aware they have.

“Imagine if tomorrow morning we read that the major food pantry programs lost half of their budget,” he said. “We’re really talking about something of that magnitude.”

Rubel’s concerns stem in part from data he obtained through a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, which state officials confirmed. For P-EBT benefits issued for the summer of 2021, nearly 600,000 students across the state never redeemed the money, the data showed.

That meant roughly 27% of the more than 2.2 million students who received the benefits never used them — with the expired benefits totaling roughly $222 million.

And for the expiring benefits from the summer of 2022, more than 263,000 recipients in New York City had not used the benefits, according to data shared by Rubel. That meant more than $100 million in potential food benefits were at risk of expiring.

Rubel worries the state hasn’t conducted sufficient outreach to inform families about each round of the funds. He said he’s urged state officials to request an amendment to the program timeline from the federal government.

The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, or OTDA, which oversees the P-EBT program, said the expiration of the funds was based on federal statutes and regulations.

“The deadline cannot be extended,” officials said in a statement.

In a handful of other states, officials have amended their P-EBT programs to effectively extend the timeline for families to use their benefits. In California, for example, officials allowed households to request a restoration of their benefits if they had expired without ever being spent.

New York officials, however, said they had no plans to seek federal approval to amend the P-EBT program.

Here’s what families should know:

When will benefits start to expire?

P-EBT benefits automatically expire 274 days, or about nine months, after they were last used. More than 60% of the summer 2022 benefits were issued to families last May, meaning those who have yet to use them will see their funds start to expire in February.

Whenever families use the benefits, the timeline will reset and they will have another 274 days before the funds are at risk of expiration.

How can families replace their cards?

Families who have lost their P-EBT card can get a replacement by calling 1-888-328-6399.

Why are some families not using the funds?

Since the pandemic began, OTDA has issued more than $6.3 billion in P-EBT benefits, with about 60% going directly to the existing accounts of households already receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. Others received the funds on state-issued P-EBT cards.

The state maintains detailed information about the benefits on its website, and operates a phone helpline at 1-833-452-0096.

OTDA officials previously told Chalkbeat they’ve conducted extensive public outreach and worked with advocacy groups to help raise awareness of the food benefits. The state’s Education Department has also distributed messaging about the benefits to local school districts, officials said.

Families with valid phone numbers on file with their school district should also have received a text message whenever new benefits became available, according to state officials.

Some families, however, said they never received such text messages, and others have struggled to access the benefits.

“We should be striving for 100%,” said Angela Trude, an NYU professor who has studied food access and government benefits. “We want everybody to use the benefits.”

Trude said she’s worked with families who falsely assume that using food benefits could take money away from others who are in greater need, or that the government will eventually ask them to return the funds.

It’s critical to combat these misconceptions, she said, while also communicating that all families should use the benefits.

“If these families feel like they are taking away, then instead of not using them, they can actually buy nonperishable foods and donate them to community organizations and food pantries,” Trude added.

Rubel believes nearly all of the expired benefits from the summer 2021 disbursement occurred among families who are not SNAP recipients, as SNAP households received the benefits in their existing accounts and could keep spending as usual in order to use them.

For families who have been able to take advantage of the benefits, advocates have said they can be hugely consequential. Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York, said P-EBT funds “can be the difference between a child going hungry or having a healthy, nutritious meal.”

“We know families are hurting — 3 out of 4 have told us it’s been harder to afford groceries than in 2022 — so we hope every household eligible for P-EBT takes advantage of this benefit,” she said in a statement. “We know how important it is to get the word out about these funds before they expire, and urge families to check their EBT accounts and keep their cards handy.”

New York needs more outreach, expert says

Wendy De La Rosa, an assistant marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied government benefits, said New York and other states should be doing more to effectively reach families.

Using text messages to notify families about their benefits is a “fundamentally flawed” approach, according to De La Rosa.

“Scams are through the roof, and every security expert is telling us to be scared,” she said. “In what world would we think that a single text message — often coming from an unknown number — would meaningfully increase uptake?”

For students experiencing housing instability, she added, phone numbers on file with school districts may be inaccurate or outdated.

“It has to be a text message, and an email, and a letter, and phone calls, and actually figuring out, ‘Which parents have we not reached?’” De La Rosa said. “And then making a concerted effort to reach them so that everybody is informed.”

Some families also respond better to certain messaging around benefits. Increasing the degree of ownership families over the benefits can spur more to use them, De La Rosa said. Families are more likely to make use of benefits that are framed as something they are entitled to, rather than those that are seen as a program meant to help them.

A permanent summer food benefits program on the horizon

Despite her concerns, De La Rosa said she’s pleased to see New York among the states that have opted into a permanent federal summer food benefits program. Across the country, 9.5 million students who would have been eligible for the benefits will likely go without them this year, after at least 12 states declined to participate in the program.

“When you put it in that context — where you have families in some states experiencing child hunger because the legislators didn’t want to implement this policy — then of course New York is ahead of the curve,” she said.

This story was updated on Feb. 14 with new data on unused benefits from the summer of 2022.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Many schools want to keep tutoring going when COVID money is gone. How will they pay for it?

2024-02-01T19:21:58+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

As Kelli Bottger works on tutoring programs across Louisiana, she’s been taking state lawmakers on tours, hoping they’ll see what she sees: Tutoring works.

On a visit to an elementary school in East Baton Rouge Parish this past fall, lawmakers took note of how close students had gotten to their tutors. Those relationships had even motivated kids who’d missed a lot of school to attend more regularly.

“It’s one thing for us to explain tutoring, it’s another thing to see it in practice,” said Bottger, who directs the Louisiana Kids Matter Campaign. The organization is piloting reading and math tutoring as part of a $2 million initiative funded by the state and the national nonprofit Accelerate. “They liked the one-on-one attention they were getting with their tutor. They liked being heard and listened to.”

Federal pandemic aid paid for a major expansion of tutoring across the U.S. As the money runs out, education officials and advocates are pushing for state legislators and schools to find a way to keep these programs going. There’s widespread agreement that lots of kids still need academic help, and schools need to provide it.

But the big question is: Where will the money come from?

State lawmakers have lots of funding requests on their plates right now, and not just from schools. Even if some states do come through with extra funds, it will likely be less than what schools had to work with before. That’s left school leaders scrambling to find alternative funding sources and poring over their budgets to figure out what can go so tutoring can stay.

“There is a lot of conversation about what strategic investments districts need to be making, and what should be prioritized,” said Nakia Towns, the chief operating officer for Accelerate, which funds and researches tutoring efforts. “High-dosage tutoring has such an incredible payoff for kids,” she said, that it should be “right at the top of that list.”

Why some states may keep spending on tutoring

Forty states have spent money on tutoring since the pandemic began, according to a recent review conducted by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University program that researches tutoring.

That’s added up to a huge investment. Last year, the nonprofit Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents state education department heads, estimated that states would spend $700 million of their federal COVID relief dollars to expand tutoring efforts. And local school districts are expected to spend more than $3 billion of their own COVID aid on tutoring, according to an estimate from the Georgetown University think tank FutureEd, based on data compiled by the company Burbio.

Many states also worked to ensure the quality of those tutoring programs. The Stanford review found that 26 states set ground rules so that schools would follow tutoring best practices, such as keeping groups small and holding sessions several times per week. Some say after states did all that legwork, it makes sense not to walk away now.

Already, some states have pledged continued funding — and federal officials have indicated they’d look favorably on state requests for more time to spend pandemic aid if it’s going toward tutoring.

Virginia put an extra $418 million in its state budget for academic recovery this past fall, and plans to spend 70% of that on high-dosage tutoring for students who failed or received low marks on state tests. Michigan set aside $150 million in state funds last year for intensive tutoring under the state’s MI Kids Back on Track program.

Others are working on it. Some Texas districts have asked the state to continue funding tutoring.

In Louisiana, Bottger and State Superintendent Cade Brumley are hopeful the legislature will sign off on putting money for in-school tutoring into the state’s main funding stream for schools. How much money that could be is still under discussion. But it would be in addition to the $5 million request the education department made to add math to the state’s $40 million literacy tutoring voucher program.

As Brumley meets with state officials to talk about more money for tutoring, his message has been: “Please give it serious consideration.”

“Students need to be able to read and do math by the time they exit our elementary schools,” he said.

In New Jersey, Paula White, the executive director of the advocacy group JerseyCAN, is asking the state to keep paying for tutoring, too.

As White tries to win lawmakers’ continued support, her plan is to emphasize the positive results that tutoring has produced and the state’s stagnant test scores — “Are we over the hump? Is the problem solved? And we know the answer to that is ‘no,’” she said.

It helps, she said, that state leaders have already talked publicly about the importance of tutoring, as New Jersey is running a $52 million high-impact tutoring grant program with federal funds. Still, she knows it will be an “uphill battle” with other federal aid drying up, and the state taking in less revenue.

“We just have to be vigilant about making sure that it gets the budgetary attention that it deserves,” White said.

How school districts are trying to fund tutoring themselves

Absent new state funds, many districts will likely be looking for programs to trim or eliminate so they can keep tutoring. That’s what Superintendent Scott Muri and his team are doing now in Ector County, Texas.

During the pandemic, the district launched a virtual tutoring program that’s become a must-keep. Ector County schools budgeted around $5 million a year in COVID funds for the program, which amounts to 1% of the district’s discretionary spending. Now staff are hoping to make up part of the difference by cutting math and reading apps that aren’t working well, or aren’t used much. In the past, teachers or schools could pick their preferred programs, but that resulted in a lot of duplication.

“Choice and options are still important, but we want the most effective options,” Muri said. “Let’s get rid of the good and only keep the great.”

Districts also will be looking for ways they could spend existing federal or state funding meant to help students from low-income families, students with disabilities, or English learners on tutoring programs. States could help by providing school districts with more guidance on how they can combine those pots of money, said Allison Socol, a vice president at The Education Trust, which recently published a guide for making equitable budget decisions as COVID aid runs out.

“One of the things we’ve heard directly from district leaders and school leaders is struggles with rethinking how those dollars are spent,” Socol said. “Status quo is hard to change.”

Some may consider shrinking the size of their tutoring program to focus on kids who most need help, or cutting an after-school tutoring program to focus on tutoring during the school day. That’s considered a better way to reach students, as many kids don’t have transportation or can’t stay after school.

However, tutoring experts are cautioning against making group sizes larger or reducing how often tutoring happens as a way to cut costs.

“Once a week in a small group of 10″ isn’t likely to produce “the outsized positive effects that we expect from high-impact tutoring,” said Nancy Waymack, who directs research partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator. “We really want to make sure that those groups are kept to a small number, so that students can get individual attention.”

There could be other avenues, too. Some school districts and tutoring programs have used federal work study grants to pay college students to tutor, according to a January report from FutureEd. Federal officials are urging schools to tap that funding source, though it can be a little complicated.

Amy Cohen, an assistant vice provost at the George Washington University, helps recruit and train college students to tutor middle schoolers in DC Public Schools. They’re paid using federal work-study funds through a program called Math Matters.

The college students take a one-credit course to learn about the curriculum they’ll use and how to work with kids, and then Math Matters matches them with schools that want tutors. So far, it’s been a popular work-study job, and the program has placed 84 tutors in schools.

With 30 years of experience working on work-study programs, Cohen says there are a few things to keep in mind.

It’s relatively easy for a college to launch a new work-study job like this, but it can be harder for a school district to know where to start. A staff person who can handle recruitment and oversight is key, Cohen said — but that’s an added cost.

And tutoring sessions backed by work-study dollars have to be planned carefully so college students don’t hit their earning limit too quickly, which would create inconsistency for kids.

“Federal work study is a hugely important and sometimes overlooked asset,” Cohen said. “I really hope that more investment is made in both thinking about how to do it well and in offering supports.”

Parents see benefit of funding tutoring long term

In the meantime, parents like Kezne’ Cook and D’Mekeus Cook of Lafayette, Louisiana would like to see states continue to fund tutoring programs like the one that’s helped their fourth grader over the last two years.

The Cook family got regular updates about their son's progress in reading from the tutoring center he attended after school with the help of a $40 million Louisiana tutoring program.

Their son, who’s also named D’Mekeus, spent part of kindergarten and all of first grade learning remotely during the pandemic. When he entered second grade, his mom could tell he was struggling to understand what they were reading in class, and he no longer wanted to read aloud at school.

The family took D’Mekeus to a tutoring center after school to get extra help, but that started to get pricey. So they were relieved when they found out about the state’s tutoring voucher program, which provides families with $1,000 per eligible child to pay for private tutoring.

As D’Mekeus got more one-on-one help, his dad noticed his son’s confidence returned, and he started doing better in other subjects at school, too. It’s important for programs like this to stick around, the Cooks said, because it takes time for kids to make progress.

“It’s not something that just occurs overnight,” said Kezne’ Cook. “I see the steps it takes to get to where he’s at now.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Will Colorado lawmakers save a team that helps Spanish-speaking child care providers get licensed?

2024-01-25T22:13:26+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

Leer en español.

Nehife Sanchez raised five kids as a stay-at-home mom and always helped her relatives and friends when they needed child care. Her youngest is 15, and the only child she takes care of regularly now is her granddaughter.

So when she was watching Univision with her husband one night in 2022 and saw an ad for a course to get certified in child care, she decided she was ready to take her love of caring for kids to the next level.

“Really, I always wanted to have something like this,” Sanchez said.

After taking the course, she was motivated to apply for a child care license. But Sanchez almost quit several times, not having realized all that it would require — background checks, visits to her local government office, inspections and changes to her home, buying the right materials, and taking more courses. She credits having Spanish-language help from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood with helping her persevere when, for example, she was shunted between county offices amid confusion about which one was responsible for her.

Lawmakers could soon provide more support to people like Sanchez. A bill introduced in the Colorado legislature this session is looking to keep and expand the department’s bilingual support team. The legislation’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Junie Joseph, said she hopes it is one small piece of a solution to the larger problem of the shortage of child care.

“We have a large population that could provide that service,” Joseph said. “But we have to make all of our community members feel supported.”

Joseph, who is bilingual herself, is sponsoring House Bill 1009 to make funding for the support permanent. If the bill is passed, the state would give the department an additional $235,000 per fiscal year to pay for the bilingual licensing unit.

Joseph says that the bill is important to her for many reasons, including as a way to increase the number of safe, quality, child care spots available across the state.

“We know this has been an underserved community,” said Carin Rosa, director of the licensing division for the department.

Sanchez said the Spanish-speaking team at the state department always answered her calls, responded to her emails, and helped her find solutions. She calls them her guardian angels.

Helping providers get licensed and avoid scams

In 2022, the early childhood department was able to hire a team of three bilingual staff members who help people through the licensing process to become licensed child care providers. The department used COVID relief money to do it. But that funding won’t be available after September.

Right now, the department says it is actively processing 25 applications for Spanish speakers, and is supporting another 69 who are already licensed but say they prefer their support in Spanish. They expect that number to grow as more people learn about their ability to access licensing.

Part of the reason for the expected increase is that in 2021, Colorado made it legal for people who can’t prove legal residency to pay for and earn certain work licenses including in childcare or education. Word has been slow to spread, and advocates say even local government employees are sometimes unaware of that new access.

Carla Colin, a program manager for the Latino Chamber of Commerce in Boulder, is supporting the bill because she believes it makes sense to help businesses.

“We don’t think language should be a barrier for a business,” Colin said. Supporting people in the language they understand “puts those in home businesses in a better position instead of working in the shadows.”

Joseph and Colin also see the bill’s purpose, and the early childhood department’s outreach to Spanish speakers, as an important part of discouraging scammers and those who overcharge and underdeliver.

Groups have popped up that claim to help Spanish speakers and those without legal status navigate the application process for professional or business licenses. But they often charge thousands of dollars, and sometimes may not actually deliver what they promise.

Colin said people sometimes call her to find out if they’re being lied to. But people often hesitate to report who the bad actors are.

Colin said she hears reports of people paying these groups more than $5,000 for a child care license.

“It’s an outrageous amount of money and especially for someone who might not be working yet,” she said.

Getting accurate information to people and support from the proper authorities is necessary, she said. She wishes the government would work more closely with teams like hers that work directly with the community.

At the early childhood department, much of the bilingual team’s first year after they were hired in 2022 was trying to get the word out. Rosa said the team has connected with some groups that work with the Latino community, translated documents, and created Spanish trainings. But the team is limited and hasn’t always been able to meet the requests for more training in the community.

Building trust and creating awareness takes time, state officials said.

If the bill is passed, one goal for the funding is to have the state’s website translated so people can find more information easily, and to do some other technology upgrades that would allow the team to carry their own caseload instead of just assisting other team members when they’re working with Spanish speakers.

Technology changes would also allow reports to be automatically generated in Spanish for Spanish-speaking providers, such as after an on-site inspection.

Rosa said the department knows Spanish speakers who apply for licenses often have had to use a child or friend who spoke English to interpret for them at on-site inspections or other meetings.

“That never felt right to us,” Rosa said.

“We really want children to have caregivers that reflect their communities, their families,” Rosa added.

Nehife Sanchez got Spanish-language help from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood in her quest to become a licensed child care provider.

And if things go well, the department leaders would like to eventually add support for languages other than Spanish. For now, they’re starting by collecting data on what the preferred language is for each applicant and existing provider.

Because she primarily speaks Spanish, Sanchez was first relying on her husband, who is bilingual, to make calls for her when he was home from work, before they learned about the bilingual licensing team.

After an eight-month process that Sanchez said she was only able to complete with the bilingual team’s hand-holding — and her own persistence — , Sanchez became a licensed home care provider in August.

She’s now in the process of getting the word out and trying to recruit families. She’s hoping to have more than 10 children in her care in the next year, which might eventually allow her husband to quit his day job so they can work together at home. He’s taken the same courses as her, and they plan to keep learning together about how to help children learn.

It’s the dream, she said.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

More than 90,000 NYC students haven’t spent recent pandemic food benefits, data shows

2023-10-20T21:20:02+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

Leer en español.

Families of more than 90,000 eligible children in New York City have not redeemed recent allotments of pandemic food benefits, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat.

That means at least $35 million dollars in potential benefits remain unused and could expire early next year, with New Yorkers losing out on the federal funds.

The funds — known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT — have been disbursed in several chunks since 2020 to help cover meal costs for families whose students usually receive free meals at school. Because New York City’s public schools have universal meals, all families are eligible regardless of household income.

This year, the state distributed multiple rounds of funds, including $120 per child for the summer of 2023, as well as at least $391 per child for the summer of 2022 and the 2021-22 school year. (Though funds from the latter disbursement could total as much as $1,671 per child based on COVID-related absences or remote-learning days during the year.)

In total, the state has issued roughly $5.4 billion in P-EBT benefits since 2020, with about 60% of benefits issued directly to low-income families who receive federal benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Advocates have praised the program for providing critical support across New York, especially as the effects of the pandemic placed additional strain on struggling families.

But among non-SNAP families, more than 90,000 students in the city had not redeemed funds from the 2021-22 school year and 2022 summer allotment, according to state data shared by education consultant David Rubel and confirmed by the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.

Among families who were receiving P-EBT cards for the first time, 41,271 had not spent any of the funds. For those with existing P-EBT cards, 49,465 had not used the benefits, either.

Liz Accles, executive director of Community Food Advocates, expressed concern over the high number of families who had yet to use the funds. She worried some may have encountered difficulties accessing them, while others may be unaware they exist or choosing not to use them.

For many in the city, the P-EBT program has been a “lifesaver,” she added.

“The vast majority of New York City public school families are struggling financially to make ends meet, and the cost of groceries is significant for everyone,” Accles said. “We hope that everyone will redeem the benefits.”

Rubel obtained the data earlier this month through a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, prompted by concerns that many families might be unaware of recent disbursements — especially those with limited English proficiency. He said he’s followed P-EBT news closely, but he wasn’t aware of the summer 2022 disbursement until he came across a related Chalkbeat article.

“If I didn’t know about it, what about the families of the other million children in our public school system,” he said, adding he worried many families may have lost or discarded their P-EBT cards. “There’s a lot of money here sitting on the table.”

All households with phone numbers on file with their school district should have been notified by text when benefits became available, according to OTDA. Those receiving benefits for the first time were provided additional instructions about how to activate and use their P-EBT cards. Families receive another text if benefits remain unused six months after receiving them, state officials said.

The state’s Education Department also issued messaging about the benefits to all school districts in New York, officials added.

Still, for families who haven’t heard about the benefits, have forgotten, or have otherwise yet to redeem them, there’s still time to spend funds from the recent allotments.

Here’s what families need to know:

Who is eligible?

All families with children who attended K-12 in the city’s public schools during the 2021-22 school year were eligible for food benefits allotted for that year and the summer of 2022. Those who attended school last year were also eligible for the summer 2023 benefit. Those in charter, private, and other schools, or prekindergarten, who received free meals through the federal school lunch program were also eligible.

Families were eligible regardless of their immigration status.

How were benefits distributed?

Families that receive SNAP, state Temporary Assistance, or Medicaid benefits got their disbursements directly added to those accounts.

All other eligible families received funds on a P-EBT card, which was issued with their first allotment of benefits.

How can you replace your state-issued P-EBT card?

Those who have lost their P-EBT card can get a replacement by calling 1-888-328-6399.

There is no deadline for requesting a replacement card, according to state officials. Though if one is needed, officials suggest requesting one as soon as possible.

What can you use P-EBT for?

The benefits can only be used to purchase food items.

When do the benefits expire?

P-EBT funds are available to families for 274 days, or about nine months, after being issued.

Each time a family spends some of the funds, the remaining balance is valid for another 274 days, state officials said.

Why should you consider using the benefits?

All families should spend the benefits, regardless of their financial status, Accles said.

P-EBT benefits, like the federal stimulus checks that were distributed across the pandemic, provide community benefits that extend beyond the food they purchase, she added. While the funds can help cover groceries and other meal costs, their use also bolsters the local economy.

“There is a dual purpose to this,” Accles said. “It’s in everyone’s interest for those dollars to be used.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

‘Miss, I have anxiety’: Denver school mental health providers fighting to save pandemic-era program

2024-01-25T00:55:42+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

When 50 students at Denver’s George Washington High School were flagged on a survey as having “extremely elevated risk” for mental health struggles, social worker Sarah Hartman was able to check in with all 50 and offer them services.

That’s a rarity given the bulging caseloads of most school social workers and psychologists, Hartman and others said — and it was only possible because Hartman is part of a pilot program launched in 2021 that originally added mental health providers to 10 Denver schools.

The program was aimed at helping the majority of students who don’t regularly see a school psychologist or social worker. Those providers are busy serving students with disabilities who are legally entitled to services, and they often don’t have time to help other students struggling with depression, grief, and the trauma of growing up during COVID.

Out of the 50 students to whom Hartman offered mental health services, only five said no.

“Kids would be like, ‘Miss, I have anxiety,’” Hartman said in an interview. “When you ask them if they want help, they want help.”

But that help could soon go away.

The pilot program is funded with temporary federal pandemic relief dollars known as ESSER. Because of a merger with an existing Denver Public Schools program focused on substance abuse prevention, the program has expanded to 31 schools at a cost of $3.4 million this year.

But the ESSER money is set to expire this fall, though federal officials recently announced a potential extension if districts spend it on certain efforts such as tutoring. Facing a likely funding cliff, the mental health providers are fighting to keep a program they see as fulfilling what had been an empty promise from DPS to do better on mental health.

Meanwhile, the district is evaluating whether it can afford to do so. A spokesperson said in a statement that the district “is examining the benefits / impact of programming for student outcomes, as well as feasibility to sustain programming as is.”

“How fair is it to identify a concern but then not have the resources to address the concern?” Joe Waldon, a social worker in the program at Hill Campus of Arts and Sciences, asked the school board Monday. “This is a huge ethical dilemma for me.”

A cadre of providers in what DPS calls the prevention and therapeutic specialists, or PTS, program pleaded with board members this week to find sustainable funding once ESSER expires. They shared with them a spreadsheet of more than 100 supportive comments they’d solicited from other school psychologists and social workers, teachers, parents, and students.

“She helped me calm down when I was angry,” one second grade student wrote of the provider at their school, according to the spreadsheet, which was also shared with Chalkbeat. “She taught me to let my emotions out whenever I need to by crying it out, and that it is okay.”

A fourth grade student wrote that the provider at their school taught them about “safe touch and who is allowed to see private parts.” A fifth grader wrote that they spoke to the provider about their mom’s abusive boyfriends and addiction to drugs and alcohol. “She helped me work through all of those memories and experiences,” the student wrote.

A student at East High School wrote that if not for the counseling support they received, “I don’t know how much I would (have been) able to attend classes last year because of my anxiety.”

Maria Hite, a PTS social worker at North High School, has a box of fidget toys and a mini Zen garden in her softly lit office, where students can trace a tiny rake through the sand as they talk.

Hite and the PTS team at North “have supported students in a way that our school-based mental health team do not have capacity for,” an educator at the school wrote, adding that the traditional psychologists and social workers “are already drowning as it is.”

District statistics show that in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, the PTS providers did one-on-one therapy with 415 students and group therapy with 783 students. More than 80% of those students were Black or Latino, and 83% came from low-income families — percentages that are higher than the district averages.

The providers also taught suicide prevention lessons to more than 2,400 students, and lessons on dealing with stress and anxiety or the dangers of vaping, drinking, and using drugs, to more than 17,000 students. If a student gets caught with drugs on campus, the PTS providers can provide counseling and intervention as an alternative to out-of-school suspension.

School psychologists and social workers are in high demand in DPS, and the PTS providers are not worried about finding jobs if the program ends. But they are worried that they will once again be pulled into the paperwork-heavy and crisis-heavy work of serving students with high needs and disabilities, and that the students they serve now will fall through the cracks.

Said Waldon: “How do you tell a child, ‘I don’t have time?’”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Thousands of students with disabilities are set to ‘age out’ of school. After a pandemic year, they may get more time to prepare for what’s next.

2021-05-12T17:32:05+00:00

This was supposed to be the year that Jake Smith got a lot of hands-on practice working and doing tasks on his own as he got ready for life after school.

Jake has autism and Down syndrome and is in a life skills program at a high school in Harford County, Maryland. He is one of the thousands of young adults with disabilities in the U.S. who are over 18 but still in school — usually in publicly funded transitional programs that offer hands-on job training or time to learn life skills, like doing laundry or shopping for groceries.

Just before the pandemic hit, Jake’s mother, Tracy Smith, was encouraged by the progress her son made getting to class on his own and learning to vacuum at his job at a local hospice. But when school went virtual and work stopped, a lot of plans went out the window.

Monthly field trips to practice social interactions ended, and Jake’s in-person speech therapy moved to video chat. Through a screen, it was much harder to practice the kinds of social skills Jake needed to work on.

“You can’t teach it virtual,” Smith said. “You have to teach that in a group.”

This month, Jake turned 21. The milestone birthday means he is about to “age out” of his program, a challenge for young adults like him in any year, but made all the more difficult because of the disruption wrought by COVID-19.

Now, lawmakers in at least half a dozen states — Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — have introduced bills that would give this group of students additional time in school after they would usually age out. Smith is among the parents in Maryland advocating for extra time for their children.

“Another year in the school, especially in the setting he’s familiar with, would have really helped him build that confidence to move forward,” Smith said. “And it would give him those skills that he could take with him.”

It’s unclear how many of the legislative efforts will be successful. But the wave of bills is an acknowledgment that many older students with disabilities didn’t get what they needed during the pandemic, and it points to a larger question: What exactly is owed to the students who went without services while schools were virtual or disrupted for months?

“There is so much thinking about K-12, but it’s really critical that this group of young adults not get lost in all of the other challenges that schools and states are facing,” said Wendy Tucker, the senior director of policy at the nonprofit Center for Learner Equity, which advocates for students with disabilities.

In many states, the cutoff for students with disabilities to receive services is 21 or 22, as federal special education funds can’t pay for services after a student turns 22. States and districts that allow students to stay longer tap into their own money.

Tens of thousands of students nationwide are likely to “age out” of their educational services this year. In the 2018-19 school year, the latest year with federal data available, 55,000 students with disabilities who were 20 or 21 received services across the U.S., though that leaves out some students in states that allow students to stay longer.

In some places, those students have already been told they’re entitled to more.

Virginia set aside money in its budget to pay for students who turned 22 to attend school for another year. New York City has said students set to age out of education services can stay an extra year, and state education officials in New York are “strongly encouraging” school districts to provide extra time this summer or next school year to students turning 21. In Clark County, Nevada, school officials will let students who’ve turned 21 stay an extra year if their special education team says it’s needed.

In Broward County, Florida, schools are letting students who’ve turned 22 stay on for the district’s summer program. Orange County schools in Florida also are letting students who turn 22 this spring attend the district’s extended school year this summer.

But timing is critical. Advocates worry that the longer these efforts take, the harder it becomes to get the word out to families whose children may qualify for additional help, and for districts to hire the staff they need to pull it off. Laws requiring districts to offer students additional time or services, they say, would make it easier to inform families of their rights — instead of directing them through the usual complaint process to get make-up services, which can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford private legal help.

“If we have to do it one by one, and case by case, it also means, realistically, that families with more resources are going to be more likely to get the additional time,” said Ashley Grant, who oversees postsecondary readiness for the nonprofit Advocates for Children of New York, which is part of a coalition that’s supporting the New York bill.

So far, the federal government hasn’t officially weighed in. But some advocates, including Tucker’s organization, hope federal officials will encourage states to extend services for students with disabilities and clarify whether schools could use coronavirus relief money to pay for it — which has been a sticking point in some states where legislation has been introduced.

Students who receive transitional services were especially affected by the pandemic. While many schools tried to provide them remotely — using virtual job shadows or teaching students how to grocery shop online — parents say it often paled compared to the hands-on training their children were supposed to receive. Some say their children simply couldn’t access the virtual stand-in.

And even when students went back to school in person, businesses and vocational programs often were closed or not operating at full capacity, making it hard for students to participate in their usual job training.

In Chicago, Merari Olascoaga’s son attended a specialty public high school for young adults with disabilities before turning 22 and aged out in March.

Olascoaga’s son, who has cerebral palsy, had anticipated spending time in the community this year to learn about jobs that might be a good fit for his skills. But while school was remote, that didn’t happen.

Jake Smith cooks at home. During the pandemic, his mother devised exercises to help her son cook, clean, and track events in a day planner.

“It’s really frustrating as a parent to see your child being left out,” said Olascoaga, who is hoping proposed legislation in Illinois will give her son and others more time in school. “It’s not only for my child, it’s for all the kids who are in this situation. Because all of them have dreams, and they dream to find something in the community, be part of it, and be given the opportunity to explore and get the help that they need.”

Many families tried to fill the gap in services by creating their own lessons at home to help their children practice their skills. Smith, for example, devised exercises to help her son cook, clean, and track events in a day planner.

Another critical part of transitional programs is helping students and families understand the complicated web of agencies that manage vocational training and job placement for adults with disabilities and how to apply for services they may qualify for after they age out of school. During the pandemic, many families didn’t get the same support in this area.

“It’s tough enough when you have a team around you,” said Peg Kinsell, the institutional policy director at SPAN, a parent advocacy group in New Jersey. “But when all that’s gone, they’re really left out on their own.”

That happened to Thomas McHale, whose school district in Westchester County, New York, paid for him to attend a private day school from the time he was in kindergarten until he turned 21 last year. McHale, who has autism and a developmental disability, said he felt displaced and abandoned when he was suddenly no longer able to see his classmates and teachers in person.

Instead of the daily therapy he was used to, McHale’s therapist called once a week and sometimes visited in person in the driveway. It helped, but it wasn’t the same, McHale said.

Over the years, school helped him become more social and learn how to cope when he felt angry. But without the hugs and other in-person support he was used to, McHale says he reverted to old behaviors.

“I was punching walls again,” he said. “I was not happy. Basically, my 21-year-old self was put back into a 5-year-old’s mindset.”

Thomas McHale cares for a goat at the local farm where he works in Westchester County, New York.

His mother, Francesca Hagadus-McHale, is among the parents in New York who are working with lawmakers to try to get services extended for students who either aged out last school year, like her son, or those who will age out this year. Though her state encouraged districts to extend those services, her district did not opt to do it.

If the legislation passes, Hagadus-McHale says she’d want to see her son get additional therapy and help planning for life after school. Hagadus-McHale made dozens of phone calls to help secure a part-time job at a local farm where her son feeds and cares for the animals, but she says more could have been done to help prepare him for the transition.

McHale says if he and other students could get back missed services, it would be “extremely helpful,” and he’s supportive of efforts to try to make that happen.

“It felt like I was in limbo,” McHale said. “I think getting back that time with your therapist, or just seeing them more, would help rekindle that bond that you had before it got stripped away.”

Schools may lose access to emergency hotel stays, a critical strategy to help homeless students

2023-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

This story was co-published with USA Today.

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

SAN DIEGO — Each request in Linda Lee Garibay’s inbox offers a tiny glimpse into San Diego County’s housing crisis and its profound effect on kids.

On a Thursday in early November, a family with four children in the San Diego Unified School District had just been evicted. Another San Diego family with a 6-year-old needed to leave the trailer park where they’d been staying. In the Poway Unified district, a family of four needed a respite after sleeping in their car for over a month.

Lee Garibay, a project specialist for the San Diego County education office, reviewed each family’s situation, then helped to reserve them a free room at a Motel 6 close to their child’s school. She’s the engine behind what is likely the country’s largest emergency hotel stay program supporting students experiencing homelessness.

“You spend so much time dealing with families that need help and not having anything to give them,” said Susie Terry, who coordinates homeless education services for San Diego County. “I had homeless liaisons who were just like, ‘This is the first time I feel like I actually have some real help to offer.’”

San Diego’s Project Rest and other programs like it exemplify the way schools are increasingly expanding their work beyond teaching and learning to meet the basic needs of students and their families. Hotel stays have become a crucial strategy for schools seeking to address rising student homelessness and chronic absenteeism. They are also unprecedented: Never before have schools had the money and permission to offer this kind of material aid at such a scale.

School staff and advocates for homeless youth say these programs have been transformative: The stability they provide boosts school attendance and allows kids to focus on their schoolwork. But despite their impact, programs like Project Rest are at risk of disappearing.

That’s because many are funded with federal pandemic aid for homeless students that goes away next school year, and along with it, special spending rules that allow for hotel stays. Federal officials have said schools cannot use the federal funds they typically receive to help homeless students on short-term housing, such as hotel stays.

Terry is searching for funding alternatives, but isn’t hopeful.

“I think it’s a shame,” she said, “because it’s desperately needed.”

Linda Lee Garibay at a park in Chula Vista, California. Lee Garibay is a project specialist for the San Diego County education office who books free short-term hotel stays for families.

Why schools are turning to hotels to help homeless kids

Before the pandemic, Terry got the occasional call from a school liaison asking if the county education office could do anything to help a family that needed a place to stay. All she could do was refer them to other agencies, where families often had to wait for housing. The federal McKinney-Vento program that provides funds for homeless students has a miniscule budget and doesn’t allow for short-term hotel stays.

So when the federal government gave states and schools $800 million in COVID aid to help homeless students — eight times what they’d usually get in a year — plus instructions that they could use that money for short-term housing assistance, Terry decided to hire a staffer and launch the hotel program.

She knew there would be high demand. More than 20,000 homeless students lived in San Diego County during the 2021-22 school year, state data show. That meant 4.3% of students did not have a fixed and adequate place to stay at night, compared with the national average of 2.4%.

But even Terry sorely underestimated the need. Initially, her team expected one or two requests a week. They typically get 10 a day.

“It was shocking,” she said.

Since the program launched 20 months ago, it has housed more than 1,200 families. Together, San Diego County’s education office and a dozen local school districts have spent around $640,000 to run it. On a single day in November, 64 students and their families were staying at hotels through the program.

In the past, schools typically advised families in need of housing to call the county’s social services helpline. But they were unlikely to get into a shelter within a day, or even a week. So parents and kids often slept in their cars or on the street while they waited. Now, through Project Rest, families can check into a hotel room within 24 hours.

Students have needed a hotel stay for all kinds of reasons, Lee Garibay says. Many were staying with family or friends and were asked to leave with little warning.

Some need a break from sleeping in their cars. San Diego’s safe parking program offers security, but no showers, and even those lots have waitlists.

Others are fleeing domestic violence. Some stay with family during the week, but need lodging on weekends. Some saw their homes destroyed by a fire or landslide.

And this fall, Lee Garibay helped a 17-year-old with a 2-week-old baby after they ran out of days at a local shelter and had nowhere else to go.

Many shelters and housing resources cater to single adults, so it can be “transformative” when schools can find housing for families, said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of homeless youth.

“It’s a critical intervention at this moment,” she said.

Related: As families struggle to find housing, more schools are hiring staff to help. The clock is ticking.

How hotel stays can help homeless students

A key feature of the program is that families are offered all kinds of support while they stay at the hotel. Families often enroll in CalFresh, which helps low-income families pay for food, and get connected with a housing case manager.

Some families have cried when they found out a person would help them look for housing, Terry said. The county education office doesn’t keep data on how many families find stable housing, but case workers are sometimes successful. In early November, a social worker in the South Bay Union School District wrote to Lee Garibay that a family could check out of their motel room because an agency had found them permanent housing. “That’s what we like to hear!” Lee Garibay exclaimed.

The program can also lead to kids getting more support at school.

Some families who’ve stayed in hotels weren’t identified as homeless by their school before — often because they were afraid to let the staff know — and didn’t realize their child is legally entitled to stay at their school and receive transportation, even if they move.

Julia Sutton, a social worker for the Chula Vista Elementary School District in California, looks over homes and an industrial area near Finney Elementary in late November.

Social workers in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, for example, make sure families staying at a hotel know about other services the district can offer, whether that’s priority access to before- and after-school programs, trauma-informed counseling for their child, or reimbursement for driving to school.

Lee Garibay logs the information of every family who uses the program — how many kids they have, what schools they attend, what help they need — in a giant blue spreadsheet. If a family uses the program for a second time, Lee Garibay looks at which resources they were connected with and tries to figure out what helped — and what didn’t.

“We work in education, we don’t work in housing,” she said. “But at the same time, from my perspective, if we don’t help assist them with housing, how are we going to make sure that they are stable in their education?”

The Chula Vista Elementary School District has become one of the county’s top referrers to the program. They’ve housed 55 families in hotels since the start of the school year.

Located just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the district of 29,000 serves families who live in million-dollar homes and families who sleep in store parking lots. The community has no family shelter or official safe parking program. Depending on traffic, the nearest shelter that accepts children can be over an hour away by car — a trip many families can’t afford in San Diego County, where gas prices are much higher than the national average.

Additionally, the rising cost of food and rent since the pandemic and an increase in asylum-seeking families crossing the border have intensified housing needs, school staff say.

On left, backpacks that social worker Julia Sutton keeps for children who need them at Finney Elementary.

Julia Sutton is one of eight social workers who works with students experiencing homelessness in the district. Academics improve when kids have lights to do their homework, Sutton said, and they’re sleeping on a bed, not crunched up in the car.

Knowing they have a place to stay can put children at ease. Sutton recalls one student who came up to her in early November to excitedly report: “I heard we have more nights at the hotel!” Mothers have told the social workers that when their kids see the Motel 6 has a pool, it helps them feel like they’re not in crisis, if only for a little while.

“It’s only 15 days, but it’s more stable than jumping from place to place each night,” Sutton said. “They’re still in crisis, but at least they’re getting to school every day and there is a deeper sense of community with your school. They feel supported.”

Making sure kids and families feel safe

In San Diego, Project Rest is a partnership between the county education office and San Diego Youth Services, a nonprofit that supports youth experiencing homelessness and has a corporate contract with Motel 6. The streamlined process is easier for service providers to navigate than working with individual hotels, said Gillian Leal, a program manager for the organization.

A family needs a government-issued ID to check in, but doesn’t have to put down a credit card for damages. That arrangement is crucial. For one, many families don’t have a credit card. And there’s no chance that a paperwork glitch will result in a canceled room.

The San Diego program allows families to stay at a hotel for five nights at a time. If their school district is contributing funds, they can stay for up to 15. But elsewhere, school districts have been hesitant to allow hotel stays for that long.

Gillian Leal, program manager for San Diego Youth Services' TAY Academy, sorts through clothing donations meant to support youth experiencing homelessness on Monday, Nov. 27.

When U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona first issued guidance for the $800 million in COVID aid in early 2021, he wrote that the funds could be used for short-term, temporary housing, such as “a few days in a motel.” Many school officials interpreted that to mean two or three days, although Terry said that short time frame can make it hard to get families help in a compassionate way.

This fall, after nearly two dozen education organizations, including SchoolHouse Connection, urged the U.S. Department of Education to explicitly permit longer motel stays, a top official issued a clarification that the length of short-term housing provided could vary based on families’ circumstances and other factors.

Similar programs exist elsewhere. In Ohio, Cincinnati Public Schools partners with a local nonprofit that serves homeless youth to house families at a Quality Inn along a public bus route. They’ve housed more than 220 families at the hotel over the last year and a half.

In central Florida, Gigi Salce, a wraparound services specialist for the School District of Osceola County, has worked with Stayable Suites and Rodeway Inn. The partnership has helped families get off housing wait lists and kept kids from sleeping in Walmart parking lots.

And on California’s Central Coast, the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District has housed 63 families through its partnership with Motel 6 over the last year and a half. Donnie Everett, an assistant superintendent who oversees support services for the district, said the program has boosted attendance and kept students on track for graduation.

But there are some challenges beyond schools’ control.

If the area is a tourism destination, rooms can fill up quickly. In San Diego, for example, the program is harder and more expensive to run during the annual Pride Festival and Comic-Con. Rural areas, like San Diego’s mountainous East County, are less likely to have hotels near schools. And some hotels are deterred by the possibility of damages or last-minute cancellations.

“It was a bit of a struggle to find the right hotel that would accept families,” said Katie Jensen of UpSpring, the nonprofit that books rooms for Cincinnati students. “People don’t necessarily want homeless families on their properties.”

School districts may not be able to afford their hotel stay programs once they exhaust federal COVID relief funds. In an email, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said those relief dollars could be used for short-term housing because social distancing rules meant shelters weren’t available to many families. That’s no longer the case — and if McKinney-Vento program funds were spent on housing, they would quickly be exhausted, leaving little to provide for students’ educational needs, the spokesperson said.

The McKinney-Vento program, which focuses on making sure homeless students have access to the same educational opportunities as their peers, is around $100 million a year for the whole country, compared with $800 million in pandemic assistance for homeless students.

Everett in Monterey is working to secure private funding for his district’s program. Terry is looking to see if she can tap into county or state funds to keep a smaller version of their program alive.

Some states have decided to step in. Maine started a pilot program this year that gives schools emergency money to prevent student homelessness, and one allowable use is a short-term hotel stay. Since 2016, Washington state has offered grants to provide stability to homeless students that can be used on hotel stays of up to three months.

A school bus outside Finney Elementary on Friday, Nov. 3. The school is part of the Chula Vista Elementary School District, which has housed dozens of families in hotels this year.

Mary Jane Palacios, the assistant manager of a Motel 6 that works with Project Rest, says hotels and motels that partner with schools need to make sure their properties are welcoming, and treat families with empathy and dignity.

At her location in Chula Vista, for example, if a family leaves behind their belongings, the staff will hold items for up to 30 days.

“We know you have a whole life inside of that room,” she said.

Palacios experienced homelessness as a child, and remembers what it felt like to walk out of a hotel with her mother and to be bullied at school.

“I totally get where a lot of the struggling moms are coming from, I totally get where the kids are coming from,” said Palacios, who watches each morning as families fan out in different directions from the Motel 6 parking lot, some running to catch the trolley to go to school.

So while she tells families to remember that their circumstances are temporary, she also stocks the pool chest with floaties for kids to play with. She makes sure the hotel is decked out with spider webs and candy for Halloween. And in December, her staff hands out hot cocoa and decorates a real Christmas tree.

“I like to put that out for the kids,” Palacios said, “because I wish those programs were there for us when we were little.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

As families struggle to find housing, more schools are hiring staff to help. The clock is ticking.

2023-12-21T10:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

CINCINNATI — It was late September when Latoya Singley got the eviction notice saying she and her 6-year-old had seven days to clear out of their apartment.

Singley called Cincinnati’s shelter hotline repeatedly for weeks, but there were no beds available. Singley and her son couldn’t stay long with Singley’s sister, because having guests would jeopardize her sister’s subsidized housing.

Singley worried about her son, who’s autistic and needs specialized support. “It would be different if it was just me,” Singley said. “But I have a child — I can’t be outside.”

Her frequent calls to the hotline yielded results. An intake worker referred Singley’s case to Megan Rahill, a shelter and housing specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools. Rahill flagged the family with a bright orange “EXTREMELY HIGH” priority label and pushed them to the top of shelter waitlists. Just in time, space opened up at Bethany House, the city’s main family shelter.

“It changed so much for us,” Singley said in early December. They felt safe, instead of scared. Her son enrolled in an elementary school where Singley liked the teachers and therapists. And she landed an appointment to check out a two-bedroom apartment.

Latoya Singley at Bethany House, Cincinnati's main family shelter. She's one of many parents who received housing help from Cincinnati Public Schools this year.

Rahill is part of a growing contingent of school staffers whose primary job is to help students and their families navigate housing systems. Many districts have used their share of an unprecedented $800 million in COVID relief funding for homeless students to shrink gaping holes in the social safety net, providing services that didn’t used to be schools’ responsibilities.

Schools have leaned into this type of work in part because research shows housing instability affects everything from attendance to test scores to graduation rates.

Project Connect, Cincinnati Public Schools’ program that supports students and families experiencing homelessness, used to provide mostly educational support. Now, with $1.5 million in COVID aid and more staff, Project Connect ensures fewer families have to sort through a complex web of housing and social service agencies alone.

Against a rising tide of family homelessness, Cincinnati’s housing systems navigators are on track to provide help to twice as many students this school year as last year.

But the looming expiration of pandemic funding means this help could be going away. Rahill’s shelter and housing position, for example, is only funded through June.

“We won’t have the staff, we won’t have the same level of services — unless we find some miracle funding,” said Rebeka Beach, who manages Project Connect.

How housing systems navigators help homeless students

The idea of hiring a navigator started in the health care industry in the 1990s. The American Cancer Society was an early pioneer, deploying navigators who helped patients get screenings, treatment, and family support.

Schools picked up the model at the urging of federal education officials and advocates for homeless youth, who said it made sense for schools because staff were already in contact with families, and often had their trust.

Having a person who specializes in housing has allowed the Cincinnati school district to form closer relationships with local shelters and housing agencies, Rahill said. That’s helped families with kids get priority access to a limited supply of shelter beds and housing vouchers.

Megan Rahill, a shelter and housing specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools, calls a family in her office at Project Connect.

When Rahill was a homeless student liaison supporting 20 Cincinnati elementary schools, she often wished she could do more for families. Parents would tell her, “OK, thank you for the uniforms and transportation, but can you refer me for housing?” she said.

Rahill’s work means more families get help faster. So far this school year, she’s referred 522 children and teens to a shelter, a housing voucher, or another kind of housing support. That’s nearly as many as the district helped all of last school year.

That extra help is coming as student homelessness in Cincinnati is rising. Project Connect has identified nearly 2,700 children and teens as homeless so far this year, an increase of more than 20% compared with this time last year.

School staff say there’s a few reasons for that. The average stay at the main family shelter has stretched to over two months as families struggle to find housing. That creates longer waitlists. Rent has risen in Cincinnati much faster than in other cities, and evictions are up, following the end of pandemic-era protections. And families lucky enough to obtain a housing choice voucher are finding it increasingly difficult to find landlords who will accept the rental subsidy.

Rahill sees how that housing crunch has affected families.

On a Friday in early December, she spoke on the phone with the mother of five elementary-age children who had a month to leave their home of six years. Their heat was broken and a city inspection turned up faulty wiring — a “death trap,” the mother had been told. The landlord wasn’t returning her calls. As the stress mounted, she could tell it was affecting one of her children’s behavior at school.

Rahill made sure the parent knew about her rights to relocation assistance, and shared a list of apartments that may accept housing vouchers. Then she offered to refer her to an agency that could help pay for a security deposit and first month’s rent — a step the mother had tried on her own without success.

“If it comes through me, then you are more likely to hear from them,” Rahill explained. She urged the mother to hang on to her number: “We would definitely make sure that you guys weren’t out on the street.”

Before she hung up, Rahill had one more thing to say. “You were mentioning that you guys weren’t going to be able to have Christmas,” she began. The district was hosting a toy drive, but was at capacity. “Do you mind if I put you on the waiting list and I’ll give you a call if we have leftover toys?”

Later that Friday, Rahill got a message from another mother who was sleeping in her car with her four kids, including a preschooler. She’d applied for a housing voucher with the district’s help, but hadn’t heard back from the housing authority yet.

“I’m really desperate at this point,” the mother said in her voicemail. “I just need somewhere for me and my kids to go.”

Rahill caught her breath as she listened, then dialed the parent’s number. She offered to make a priority shelter referral that would expedite the process.

After she hung up, she highlighted the family in bright orange. Extremely high priority.

Project Connect provides jackets, shoes, uniforms, backpacks, and more for Cincinnati students in need.

Schools can’t clear all the housing hurdles

As part of her work, Rahill made a 10-page guide for families. It has everything from how to apply for a housing voucher to where kids can get a free haircut. She knows a kennel that is willing to take a pet so that a family can move into shelter. And her shelter connections stretch to Indiana.

When the local shelters are full, Rahill can book families a few free nights at a local Quality Inn using COVID relief funds. The hotel owners charge Project Connect a discounted $75 a night, and sometimes extend that rate to families so they can stay longer.

“Our community needs help, and if we can’t step up, who will?” said co-owner Kevin Patel.

Related: Schools may lose access to emergency hotel stays, a critical strategy to help homeless students

But Rahill can’t solve all problems. Perhaps most importantly, Project Connect is still limited by a dearth of affordable housing — a problem that plagues communities nationwide.

Rahill can usually only get families into a shelter when they are sleeping outside or in their car. Yet that situation has become more common in recent months.

Charity Tyne works part time with Project Connect to assist Spanish-speaking families.

Many immigrant families, especially newly arrived families from Venezuela and Nicaragua, don’t qualify for widely used public programs. And without Spanish-speaking case workers, they struggled to access the help that was available.

To address that gap, Project Connect used COVID aid to hire Charity Tyne to work part time with Spanish-speaking families. Before Tyne, Project Connect used interpretation services or Google Translate, but that often failed to detect when families were in need.

“There have been many instances where someone has called a family and has said: ‘Are you OK with housing?’ And they’ll be like ‘Yes, yes.’” Tyne said. “And then if they’re called by someone who speaks Spanish you hear the whole story.”

Because many immigrant families don’t qualify for benefits, Tyne orders them groceries and delivers them herself. She has built up a list of landlords who charge low rents and are willing to be flexible on rental history and employment.

It’s labor-intensive work. Recently, it took Tyne 50 calls to help one family with four children rent an apartment.

More than 100 Spanish-speaking families have Tyne’s cell phone number now.

‘There should be more of a safety net’

As schools across the country have expanded their work to meet students’ basic needs — from providing food to shelter to mental health care — one downside is that families and outside organizations may think schools have the ability to do more than they can.

Rahill distributes housing voucher applications from Cincinnati’s housing authority to families who don’t have a stable mailing address. Now, some parents call Rahill frustrated, mistakenly believing she — and not the housing authority — is processing their application.

“It just shows the gap,” she said. “There should be more of a safety net around people that’s not just some COVID funding through the school district.”

Student homelessness has risen in Cincinnati this year, and school staff say more families are sleeping outside or in their cars.

Many school districts, like Cincinnati, are weighing whether they can afford to keep the staff they hired with one-time COVID relief, said Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center at Georgetown University that studies school finance.

“That’s the tricky question,” she said. “Are we saying, basically, that when the housing system is supposed to meet the needs of kids first, it’s up to the school system to hold their feet to the fire?”

Some educators say housing and education are too closely linked for schools to just sit back and let someone else handle it.

When Cincinnati teacher Clarice Williams tutors kids in the evenings at Bethany House through Project Connect, she often meets students who have attended three or four elementary schools. Others missed large chunks of school.

Clarice Williams, a reading specialist for Cincinnati Public Schools, tutors children staying at the city's main family shelter through Project Connect.

She’s seen elementary students struggle to understand what they’re reading because they’re sounding out words so slowly, and middle schoolers who never learned crucial grammar and spelling rules.

“They are missing those foundational skills,” she said.

If schools see this work as critical, Roza said, then they have to figure out how to make it sustainable, possibly by training other existing staff to do the work.

Beach has been talking with a county agency and other organizations to see if there is a way to cobble together ongoing funding for the housing and shelter position.

For some families, like the mother and son who faced an eviction in September, a shelter stay is a bridge to permanent housing.

On a Friday in mid-December, Singley watched as her 6-year-old explored the apartment she’d just leased.

After several weeks of sleeping on an unfamiliar bunk bed at the shelter, her son had his own bedroom again. Already, Singley could see where she’d hang posters on his wall and PAW Patrol curtains in his window.

Her son is set to start at his new school after winter break. Singley feels confident about the plan they’ve put together for him, with one-on-one help in his classroom and time with a speech therapist. He’s started to learn a few words: no, shoe, and “eat eat.”

There was just one thing left to do: Call the school district to let them know they’d found an apartment, so they could send the bus.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Staffing, attendance, behavior: 7 big issues facing schools this year

2022-08-18T19:24:19+00:00

After surviving two school years “completely veiled in the pandemic,” teacher Kathryn Vaughn says this year is off to a different start.

Her stress levels are down. COVID protocols are relaxed. Teachers are feeling hopeful.

“It feels a little lighter this year,” said Vaughn, who teaches elementary school art in Tennessee. “It really feels like we’re just kind of back to business as usual.”

Many students and educators are returning to classrooms this fall with a sense of cautious optimism. But there are still many open questions after last year’s staffing shortages, student absences, and mental health and behavioral challenges interfered with academic recovery efforts.

Here are seven big issues facing schools:

How will schools handle staffing challenges?

Some schools are stepping up efforts to boost student attendance this year.

First, some reassuring news: Despite what you might have heard, there isn’t evidence of an unprecedented teacher shortage nor an exodus of teachers fleeing the profession.

Yet some schools are struggling to staff up — partly for reasons that predate the pandemic. High-poverty schools have long had trouble recruiting and retaining teachers, and the supply of new educators has dwindled over the past decade as fewer people enroll in teacher-prep programs.

But the pandemic also has created new complications. Many districts used federal relief funds to add more positions, including tutors and extra substitutes, creating huge demand for a limited pool of workers. Schools also must compete with other employers for lower-wage workers, such as bus drivers and custodians, spurring some districts to hike their pay and offer bonuses.

Those hiring pressures are bearing down on Paterson Public Schools, a high-needs district in New Jersey. Some 130 teaching positions remain unfilled, or nearly 6% of the total teaching force, about three weeks before students return, said Luis Rojas, Jr., the district official who oversees human resources. While some vacancies are expected, Rojas said the number has surged as teachers take advantage of the tight labor market.

“They understand the demand,” he said, “and folks are jumping around from school district to school district trying to move up the salary ladder and get as much money as they can.”

The causes of the staffing crunch are ultimately less important than the effect on students. Schools that can’t find enough teachers might have to raise class sizes, hire less qualified candidates, assign teachers to subjects in which they have limited training, or rely on long-term substitutes — all of which can get in the way of learning.

“I would tell you that one is too many,” Rojas said, “when you have a vacancy.”

Will student attendance improve?

Chronic absenteeism rates rose last year, as quarantines and COVID infections kept students home for long stretches.

This year, the CDC is no longer recommending that students quarantine after an exposure. Many think that will help stabilize attendance, though it’s possible other factors could persist, such as lingering student disengagement.

In Los Angeles, about half of all students were chronically absent last year. Even without quarantines, 30% of students were chronically absent, up from 19% before the pandemic.

“That is just not acceptable,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said last week as he announced a new campaign to boost attendance by visiting student homes.

In Detroit, 77% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 62% the year before the pandemic began. There, the spike was especially concerning because the district has long worked to raise attendance. Now, officials are stepping up efforts to get kids to school.

Lisa Blackwell, a district attendance agent, is part of that. This summer, she’s been knocking on doors to talk up her elementary school’s new before- and after-school care options, and explaining to parents the COVID precautions her school is taking. She’s also planning incentives to reward students, like bringing an ice cream truck to school.

“I want to focus more so on getting the kids excited to go to school,” Blackwell said. “Maybe that will push parents a little bit more to say: ‘Well, my kid is very excited to be at school, so I as a parent, I’m held accountable to make sure they get there.’”

Can schools meet students’ mental health needs?

Inside classrooms across the country last year, the crisis in young people’s mental health was all too evident. After many months of social isolation and learning by laptop, some students were prone to outbursts, meltdowns, and squabbles.

“These kids are very anxious,” said Aaron Grossman, a fifth grade teacher in Reno, Nevada. “The uptick in behavior is very real.”

The distinct but overlapping challenges of worsening student behavior and mental health were fueled by the pandemic — and the stress, financial hardships, and trauma it caused. Federal survey data from this spring confirmed the twin crises: 70% of public school leaders reported an increase in students seeking mental health services during the pandemic, and 56% said disruptive student misconduct had become more common.

Efforts to address both issues have achieved mixed results. Some schools responded to student misbehavior by leaning into restorative practices, which aim for healing over punishment, but others issued more suspensions than usual. Many schools used federal aid to hire more counselors, social workers, and school psychologists, but not always as many were needed. In an April survey, just over half of school leaders said their schools could provide mental health services to all students who require them.

Nance Roy, the chief clinical officer of The Jed Foundation, which focuses on youth mental health and suicide prevention, says schools should encourage students to reach out for help and connect them with service providers.

“It’s developing a culture of care and compassion in schools,” she said, “where there’s no wrong door to walk through for support.”

What will public school enrollment look like?

U.S. public school enrollment held steady last fall, according to federal data released this week. That came after student head counts dropped 2.8% in the fall of 2020, following years of national enrollment growth.

Last year saw a spike in preschool and kindergarten enrollment, both of which dropped sharply when many districts turned to virtual schooling. The return of full-time in-person learning, declining COVID safety concerns, and additional family outreach likely helped boost those grades. But enrollment continues to fall among students in other elementary and middle school grades, a trend that could spell trouble for some districts as the extra funding from federal COVID relief packages dries up.

The issue weighs especially heavily on school leaders in big cities where the share of small schools has ballooned. Now, some are considering school closures, which can create schools that are less expensive to run and have a wider range of programs, but will mean more disruption for students who’ve faced a lot of it in recent years.

“There are really awful tradeoffs,” Shanthi Gonzales, a former school board member in Oakland, California, told Chalkbeat this summer.

Can schools get extra academic help to students who need it most?

Many schools are offering tutoring and other kinds of academic interventions, but it doesn’t always reach the students who need the most help.

The road to academic recovery is coming into focus as data rolls in. So far, elementary school students seem to be recovering more quickly than middle schoolers, but students of all ages are still significantly behind where they would normally be on reading and math tests.

Katrina Abe, a math teacher in Houston, has seen that. Last year, her eighth graders needed extra help with seventh grade topics like interpreting graphs and understanding rates of change. Those concepts are harder to grasp virtually and without working in groups, which happened if students learned online or missed a lot of class the prior year.

This year’s class is noticeably behind last year’s, she said, likely because half of them had three different math teachers in seventh grade. To help, Abe is planning small-group instruction every day and more turn-and-talk time so students can problem solve together. She’s also going to review some fifth and sixth grade standards.

“We’re going to just take that slow, depending on their level,” she said.

Many schools are offering tutoring and other kinds of academic support, but data on which recovery efforts are working is limited. More than half of public schools said they provided high-dosage tutoring in a recent federal survey — a highly effective strategy — but schools often have trouble staffing and scheduling that support. Some districts have turned to virtual tutoring, but it often doesn’t reach students who need help the most.

Meanwhile, educators are keeping their eyes on the larger crop of teens who are behind in credits needed to graduate.

Will schools ramp up COVID relief spending?

Schools have an unprecedented pot of federal money to spend, but many are still struggling to put it to use. There’s a few reasons for that. In some states, money got stuck in red tape and arrived late. Elsewhere, schools are having a hard time finding staff to fill new positions, or hiring contractors to make building repairs.

Some districts that have been slow to spend say they’re planning to ramp up spending over time. Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, had spent only 10% of its federal COVID aid as of late June, mostly to avoid staff cuts and buy PPE. But the district says it has budgeted all the money, including to tutor more students.

Still, this aid doesn’t always feel like new money. New York City recently gave schools the OK to use $100 million in federal aid that was previously set aside for academic recovery to pay teachers, after announcing $215 million in school budget cuts.

This money also has been difficult to track: School district spending plans vary widely in quality and there’s often limited data at the state and federal levels.

But some trends are apparent. When FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, looked at spending plans for some 5,000 school districts in June, it found a quarter of federal funds were budgeted for staff, and another quarter were earmarked for academic recovery. Just under a quarter was set aside for facilities and operations, mostly to upgrade heating, ventilation and cooling systems.

How will the culture wars shape what students learn?

America’s latest culture wars are being waged inside schools.

Seventeen states now ban lessons on racism or sexism, six states restrict teaching about sexuality and gender identity, and 18 states don’t allow transgender students to play on sports teams that match their gender.

Peyton, a 12th grader who is part of a support group for Black queer youth in Alabama, said the laws send a clear message to LGBTQ students.

“It’s just enforcing that you’re not normal and society does not want you here,” they said.

In addition to making some students feel less safe, the laws are limiting what they learn.

Some teachers have curtailed class discussions about the oppression of Black people and Native Americans, and some schools are restricting students’ access to books by or about people of color and LGBTQ Americans.

The Biden administration has proposed new rules to protect LGBTQ students, but conservative states are expected to challenge those rules in court. Meanwhile, school districts that run afoul of the new state laws already are facing consequences, and more attacks are likely: Florida’s new law allows parents to file complaints or even sue if they believe their children are taught banned topics.

But for every lesson that is challenged, many more will never be taught as schools seek to avoid sanctions and controversy. In a new survey, 1 in 4 teachers nationally — and nearly 1 in 3 teachers in states with curriculum restrictions — said higher-ups told them to steer clear of contentious topics in the classroom.

As Andrew Kirk, a high school teacher in Texas, told Chalkbeat: “This chilling effect is already happening.”

Jessica Blake contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Education stories we’re watching in 2024

2024-01-02T14:22:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

This spring, the students who spent most of their freshman year of high school on Zoom will walk across the graduation stage. This fall, schools will face the expiration of billions in pandemic aid that allowed them to reenvision what schools could do for students.

This is a critical year as the nation grapples with the long-term effects of the pandemic amid a technological revolution, a still-unfolding refugee crisis, and a presidential election that could intensify political tensions.

These are some of the education stories we’ll be watching in 2024:

School districts confront the ESSER fiscal cliff

This is the last year school districts will have access to federal pandemic relief, an unprecedented influx of money meant to mitigate the effects of COVID disruptions and support student recovery. Schools received a total of $190 billion in three waves. So far, roughly $122 billion has been spent or committed, and schools still need to spend an additional $68 billion.

Some schools have spent this money on programs directly related to pandemic recovery, such as tutoring and counseling. Some have stood up or expanded programs that help families find housing or provide more intensive mental health support.

Running those programs often meant hiring more people, workers whom districts might not have the money to employ after this year. And while the money is going away, students still have significant needs.

Already major districts, such as Detroit and Montgomery County, Maryland, have announced cuts to services like college transition planning and summer school that were funded with pandemic dollars.

Districts that want to maintain these programs will face tough decisions about where to find the money and what else to give up.

“There was a clear need and with the extra funds, in many cases, really hard-working people responded,” said Marguerite Roza, the director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “But you can still say, from the outside, this was really a precarious model. It relied on one-time funds that we knew were going to go away, and we didn’t build anything to last beyond that.”

In some communities, districts have used pandemic aid to shore up budgets amid declining enrollment and to delay painful cuts and school closures. For these communities, 2024 could bring a difficult reckoning.

The expiration of pandemic aid will prompt a larger conversation about what students and schools got from that investment and whether the money was spent well or poorly.

Jennifer Reczkowicz assists a student during a typing lesson at Lincoln Elementary School in Dolton, Illinois. Max Herman for Chalkbeat

Schools must adapt to serve migrant students

Last year, many school systems across the country — but particularly New York City and Chicago — enrolled thousands of asylum-seeking students from Central and South America.

Some of these children have been out of school for months or even years. Some carry emotional wounds from things they saw and experienced on their journeys. Some are sleeping outside in tents. All are navigating a new country and a new school system with few financial resources.

In 2024, schools will need to rise to the challenge of serving these students over the long haul. Bilingual teachers were already in short supply — and bilingual counselors and school psychologists even more so. Some school districts are stepping up international recruitment to bring in more Spanish-speaking educators.

There are so many new students that cities as different as New York and Denver are seeing enrollment increases after years of declines. Increased enrollment could result in more state funding, but it’s not clear if the additional money will be enough to meet students’ needs or whether these students will stay in the cities where they first arrived or disperse to suburbs and smaller cities.

Many of these students’ needs — for mental health counseling, for academic recovery, for housing assistance — mirror those of students who were already here but at a larger scale or with greater intensity.

Even children who seem OK now may need significant support down the road, said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director at Counseling in Schools. The nonprofit provides counseling services to about 70 schools in New York City and is trying to expand its bilingual staff. Younger children, especially, may be in a honeymoon period now that they’re physically safe, getting meals at school, and making new friends, he said.

“That’s going to shift as they go from 8 years old to 12 years old. Those pains are kind of festering over time,” Dahill-Fuchel said. One smiling child his organization works with crossed the Rio Grande with about a dozen people who drowned. “That’s PTSD-kind of stuff that’s going to come up later.”

Advocates say schools need to think beyond the immediate crisis. They need to accurately assess where students are academically and think about how to serve older students with limited English skills who may be at higher risk of leaving school entirely. They also see a greater role for state education departments in offering guidance and helping school districts learn from each other.

Will our schools rise to the challenge?

AI will play a larger role in American classrooms — we’re still figuring out the ground rules

ChatGPT is a little more than a year old. In the education space, the new technology’s ability to produce an eerie mimicry of human thought and writing initially prompted fears that students would cheat widely and with impunity.

But a recent Stanford study found that cheating among high school students hasn’t increased much. And while most respondents thought it would be acceptable to use ChatGPT to generate ideas, few thought it would be OK to have AI write an essay for them. “It shows that a majority of students truly want to learn,” the lead researcher told CNN.

In the meantime, ChatGPT and other AI-powered technologies are showing up in the classroom in all kinds of ways. Students recently told Chalkbeat that they’ve used such programs to better understand concepts in history texts or to identify problems in the code they wrote for computer science class. Some schools are using AI to tutor students. The National Education Association has a guide for using ChatGPT to create lesson plans.

Given that the technology isn’t going away, K-12 schools and colleges will need to grapple with what constitutes cheating and what constitutes legitimate use that might even enhance students’ learning experience.

Researchers, meanwhile, are experimenting with using AI to read students’ college essays and grade student papers. Some observers are optimistic about the potential for AI to reduce bias and notice trends, while others worry about inaccuracy and outsourcing human judgment.

The culture wars are dead. Long live the culture wars.

November’s school board elections were generally seen as a setback for cultural conservatives, with Ballotpedia estimating that more than half of candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty lost their races. The right-wing advocacy group itself is in disarray amid associations with white supremacists and rape allegations against the husband of one founder. The founder acknowledged she had participated in a threesome with her husband and the woman who accused him of assault in an unrelated incident.

But conservative candidates still picked up seats on school boards around the country, where some are reshaping what students learn about U.S. history and how LGBTQ staff and students are treated.

Conservative concerns about progressive ideologies in public schools have also been used to justify the expansion of private-school choice in states, such as Tennessee, Florida, and Arizona.

Even as education politics remains intensely polarized, surveys find that most parents report they’re pretty satisfied with their kids’ schools — and the most negative opinions come from those without children in the schools.

This year could see some of the most intense debates recede into the background or take on new forms. The presidential election has the potential to exacerbate divisions even if education isn’t a dominant issue.

The biggest question is how these debates and policy shifts affect students and families.

Students are reconsidering the value of college — for better or for worse

This spring’s graduating class was in eighth grade in March 2020 when schools shut down, and many of them spent their freshman year — a critical year for students’ academic and social development — mostly online or bouncing in and out school due to quarantines.

These students are applying to college in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning racial preferences in admissions. They’ve had to rethink how they talk about themselves in college applications. The federal government has delayed the release of a new federal financial aid application, raising fears that fewer students will fill out the form and creating more uncertainty for families waiting on financial aid packages.

Colorado School of Mines in Golden is the most selective public university in Colorado. The science- and engineering-focused school historically has enrolled few students from low-income backgrounds.

Recent surveys show high school students are interested in education after high school but unsure about the value of a four-year college degree. They’re worried about taking on debt and not being able to pay it back. And they want to start earning money sooner.

Conservative parents, too, are less keen on sending their kids to college as they increasingly see higher education institutions as being at odds with their own values.

At the same time, Americans with college degrees still outearn those without.

The most recently available national data on college-going covers the high school class of 2022 and shows overall college enrollment increasing or stabilizing after a sharp dip during the pandemic. But enrollment is down for white, Black, and Native American students.

Meanwhile, colleges are putting more effort into retaining the students they have. High school counselors are rethinking how they support students interested in careers that don’t require a four-year degree.

The decisions the class of 2024 makes could tell us a lot about the lingering impacts of the pandemic and what students need from their schools to be successful.

Senior Reporter Kalyn Belsha and New York Bureau Chief Amy Zimmer contributed.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado.

Colorado cuenta con grandes brechas de quién termina la universidad. ¿Puede un esfuerzo pospandémico cambiar esta tendencia?

2022-09-15T11:59:00+00:00

Read in English.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores sabía que terminar la universidad iba a ser una batalla cuesta arriba.

Ya que fue el primero en su familia en asistir a la universidad, enfrentó desafíos para pagar la colegiatura, comprar libros y otros materiales y balancear un trabajo mientras seguía ayudando a mantener a sus padres, quienes cuestionaban el valor de una educación universitaria.

Haro-Flores se inscribió en la Universidad del Norte de Colorado (UNC, por sus siglas en inglés) en 2016, junto con una creciente cantidad de coloradenses latinos que se encaminaron a la universidad en la última década. Pero como muchos en su generación, Haro-Flores nunca completó sus estudios, lo cual contribuyó a una brecha persistente en la graduación universitaria.

Aunque un grupo más diverso de estudiantes se inscribió en la universidad, las brechas étnicas y raciales de Colorado entre los estudiantes con licenciaturas y estudios de posgrado casi no cambió entre 2010 y 2020, según datos del Censo.

Las brechas son aún mayores entre las personas que están cursando estudios superiores. En 2020, casi el 60 por ciento de los residentes blancos tenía algún tipo de certificación universitaria, incluidos certificados industriales. Pero solo el 38 por ciento de los residentes negros y 25 por ciento de los residentes latinos lo tenían.

Aunque otros estados también muestran brechas, el Estado Centenario cuenta con algunas de las mayores en el país entre los estudiantes negros y latinos y sus compañeros blancos.

La diferencia probablemente aumentará cuando el impacto total de la pandemia se entienda claramente debido a que estudiantes se salieron de la escuela o eligieron no seguir asistiendo a la universidad. Un mercado laboral próspero también ha causado que las personas se cuestionen si vale la pena endeudarse a largo plazo por un título universitario.

Haro-Flores nunca pensó que su experiencia imitaría estas tendencias estatales. En 2018, enfrentando dificultades para pagar la colegiatura, dejó de asistir a la universidad. El estatus migratorio de sus padres significaba que tenía pocas opciones para obtener asistencia financiera. Se volvió a inscribir en UNC en 2019, pero la pandemia lo obligó a salirse otra vez. No le gustaban las clases virtuales y quería encontrar un trabajo de tiempo completo para ayudar a sus padres, quienes habían perdido sus trabajos temporales en bodegas y viveros por recortes de personal.

Durante cierto tiempo, Colorado ha querido cambiar su estrategia de importar una gran cantidad de trabajadores con estudios universitarios para producirlos aquí mismo. Parte de su estrategia este año incluye invertir $49 millones de fondos de asistencia federal por la pandemia con el objetivo de ayudar a los residentes que nunca completaron sus estudios para que regresen a la universidad y se gradúen.

La necesidad es urgente, ya que la demanda de más trabajadores con capacitación universitaria, junto con el creciente costo de vida en Colorado, han complicado los esfuerzos de los empleadores para contratar y retener empleados.

El exsenador estatal Mike Johnston dijo que el estado ha dependido por mucho tiempo de atraer talento de otros lugares.

“Le hemos sacado provecho a esta estrategia lo más posible”, Johnston dijo. Johnston es presidente y director ejecutivo de Gary Ventures, una organización filantrópica dedicada a promover una mejor preparación escolar, el éxito entre los jóvenes y la movilidad económica.

“Ahora vamos a tener que equipar a nuestros propios jóvenes con las habilidades que necesitan para ingresar a los trabajos que tenemos, que les darán el ingreso que necesitan para pagar por la vivienda que tenemos”, dijo.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores levanta la mano durante una clase sobre administración deportiva este mes en la Universidad del Norte de Colorado en Greeley.

Los antiguos desafíos chocan con los nuevos

Chalkbeat Colorado examinó las tendencias de la asistencia a la universidad como parte de Chasing Progress, un proyecto de Colorado News Collaborative sobre la equidad social, económica y en salud de los coloradenses negros y latinos.

Las bajas tasas de asistencia a la universidad en Colorado tienen antecedentes profundos y causas complicadas. En general, solo la mitad de todos los graduados de high school se inscriben en la universidad. Los estudiantes negros y latinos que se gradúan de high school, quienes con frecuencia asisten a escuelas con menos recursos y reciben menos apoyo, asisten en porcentajes mucho menores. Cuando sí van a la universidad, muchos no completan sus estudios. Y, por años, el estado no ha invertido suficientes fondos en la educación superior, lo que significa que las universidades tienen menos dinero para apoyar a los estudiantes hasta que se gradúan.

Datos censales publicados este año muestran que en 2020 el 48 por ciento de los residentes blancos tenían una licenciatura o estudios de posgrado. Ese porcentaje es 21 puntos porcentuales mayor que el porcentaje de adultos negros y 31 puntos porcentuales mayor que el de los latinos.

Datos estatales muestran que esas desigualdades aumentan cuando se comparan otros tipos de estudios superiores, como los certificados industriales y títulos asociados.

Colorado está buscando apoyar a 700,000 residentes con estudios universitarios parciales pero sin un título para que regresen a la universidad.

La pandemia todavía presenta desafíos. A nivel nacional, la tasa de inscripciones en universidades se redujo en casi 1 millón de estudiantes desde que COVID empezó.

El estado necesitará convencer a más residentes de que los estudios universitarios importan, aunque trabajos de nivel básico ahora ofrecen salarios más altos que nunca.

Más gente se cuestiona si un título universitario vale la pena y el riesgo de endeudarse mucho para pagarlo, dijo Iris Palmer, subdirectora de colegios comunitarios en New America. Este instituto de investigaciones aboga a favor del acceso equitativo a la educación.

“Eso está empezando a degradar lo que la gente piensa sobre la educación superior”, dijo.

El estado busca equipar al 66 por ciento de los residentes con un certificado universitario o superior para 2025, pero la combinación de problemas hace que este objetivo parezca más difícil de alcanzar que nunca.

Sin acceso a trabajos que paguen más, se está dejando atrás a la mayoría de los residentes negros, hispanos e indoamericanos de Colorado, dijo Courtney Brown, vicepresidenta de impacto y planeación con Lumina Foundation. La fundación promueve el acceso más equitativo a la enseñanza superior y ha ayudado a estados para que fijen metas. (Lumina proporciona respaldo financiero a Chalkbeat. Haz clic aquí para ver una lista de otras entidades que nos respaldan y lee nuestra norma de ética.)

Reginaldo Haro-Flores se despide de Alexis Vallejos-Diaz después de una sesión de mentoría en la biblioteca de la Universidad del Norte de Colorado.

Cómo hacer que los estudiantes terminen lo que empezaron

Líderes en Colorado están dando pasos para crear más oportunidades.

El estado ha estado animando a las escuelas de high school para que agreguen cursos de nivel universitario que ayuden a sus estudiantes a obtener certificados. Creó una beca en 2014 para ofrecer asistencia con la colegiatura y otros recursos para estudiantes que los necesitan.

En los últimos dos años, el estado nombró a un director estatal de equidad para que se enfoque en reducir las brechas persistentes y reunir a los legisladores y líderes comunitarios en la creación de un plan que aproveche fondos de asistencia por la pandemia para conectar a estudiantes universitarios con oportunidades laborales.

Aunque esos programas han tenido éxito, el estado sigue quedándose corto, dijo Angie Paccione, directora ejecutiva del Departamento de Educación Superior de Colorado.

Por eso el estado agregó más programas. Parecen prometedores, Palmer dijo. Por ejemplo, 30 universidades y colegios comunitarios adoptaron el programa Termina lo que Empezaste, el cual se diseñó con base en una exitosa iniciativa del Colegio Comunitario de Pueblo. El estado busca beneficiar a más de 9,000 estudiantes para 2026.

El programa proporciona ayuda financiera para que los estudiantes regresen a la escuela y asesoría para crear planes individuales, además de maneras de cumplir con los planes y encontrar un trabajo después de que terminen sus estudios. Los asesores también ayudan a los estudiantes para que encuentren ayuda en el colegio o universidad, o fuera de ellos, que ofrezca apoyo para poner comida sobre la mesa o cuidar a sus hijos.

Aunque el dinero es un enorme incentivo, es crucial ayudar a los estudiantes para que crean que pueden terminar la universidad, dijo Richie Ince, director del programa de Pueblo: Regreso para Ganar. Él y su equipo se comunican con cada estudiante cada dos semanas para aconsejarlo, animarlo o conectarlo con recursos.

“Creo que somos muy exitosos debido a ese toque personal y solo porque estamos pendientes de ellos, realmente desde el momento en que regresan hasta el momento en que terminan”, Ince dijo.

El programa de Termina lo que Empezaste hizo que Haro-Flores, ahora de 24 años, regresara a la escuela. Se enteró del programa a través de uno de sus exconsejeros de high school. La asistencia financiera y asesoría que ha recibido casi parecen demasiadas buenas para ser verdad, dijo.

No hubiera regresado a la escuela por tercera vez sin el programa y sus fondos, dijo. Los coordinadores de Termina lo que Empezaste en UNC le dijeron que lo ayudarían con lo que necesitara. Así ha sido, Haro-Flores dijo. Ahora se siente seguro de que podrá terminar su licenciatura en ciencias del deporte.

“Este es el momento”, dijo.

Espera graduarse en 2024 y trabajar en la industria del deporte o en administración.

La ayuda que Reginaldo Haro-Flores ha recibido a través del programa Termina lo que Empezaste en UNC lo ha motivado a terminar su licenciatura en ciencias del deporte.

¿Puede mantener Colorado este esfuerzo?

Quienes abogan a favor de la educación superior dicen que Colorado también debe terminar lo que empezó al promover que los estudiantes terminen la universidad. El estado, el cual subfinancia seriamente la educación superior en comparación con otros estados, según demuestran estudios, debe seguir invirtiendo más dinero para mantener el buen camino.

A Paccione, la directora ejecutiva de educación superior del estado, le gusta decirles a los legisladores que “inviertan en los estudiantes ahora o páguenles después”.

“Si no inviertes en los estudiantes ahora, estos son los mismos estudiantes que terminarán en nuestro sistema público de seguridad social”, dijo. Estudios confirman esto.

Estudios también demuestran que vale la pena que un estudiante invierta en una educación universitaria. Michael Itzkowitz, quien trabaja para el centro intelectual de izquierda Third Way, dijo que los datos en años recientes permiten que las escuelas destaquen qué tan buenos son sus programas para que los estudiantes obtengan un trabajo y cuánto valen la pena. Cerca del 86 por ciento de todos los programas universitarios públicos producen, en cinco años, una ganancia en lo que los estudiantes gastan en su educación, dijo.

Y también hay beneficios sociales. Alfred Tatum, vicepresidente de asuntos académicos en la Universidad Estatal Metropolitana de Denver (MSU Denver, por sus siglas en inglés), dijo que la universidad ayuda a los estudiantes a conectarse con servicios de salud, participar más cívicamente y contribuir más a los impuestos estatales. En lugar del objetivo general de educar a la población en general, los líderes estatales deben tomar en cuenta cómo las personas que se gradúan de la universidad mejoran sus comunidades, dijo.

Pero comunicar esos beneficios a los estudiantes puede ser difícil cuando a algunos les preocupa el costo.

Durante las últimas dos décadas, la carga de pagar por la educación universitaria en Colorado se ha transferido más a los estudiantes y sus familias. Los ingresos de la colegiatura financian el 74 por ciento de los presupuestos universitarios para títulos de cuatro años y el 38 por ciento de los presupuestos de los títulos de dos años. Esos porcentajes son más altos, en promedio, que en la mayoría de los estados.

Janine Davidson, presidenta de MSU Denver, y John Marshall, presidente de Colorado Mesa University, dijeron que los legisladores deben invertir adecuadamente en las universidades para que puedan reducir los costos de sus estudiantes y mejorar los servicios de apoyo para aquellos estudiantes que necesitan más ayuda para terminar la universidad.

Sin una fuente constante de ingresos, a los administradores y al personal de las universidades les preocupa que los esfuerzos de Colorado se debiliten cuando los fondos federales únicos se acaben.

Esperan que las historias de éxito, como la de Darryl Sharpton, destaquen la importancia de seguir invirtiendo.

Sharpton, de 46 años, ha intentado varias veces en tres estados terminar la universidad. Ahora piensa que finalmente lo logrará. En el Colegio Comunitario de Aurora, ha encontrado más apoyo que nunca.

Está estudiando para obtener su título en ciencias de la computación. La educación superior le ha permitido desarrollar una perspectiva diferente, sobre su propio potencial y lo que vale.

“Quiero [tener] una carrera, no solo un trabajo”, Sharpton dijo, quien anteriormente trabajó entregando productos farmacéuticos.

“Hay tanta gente que quiere que triunfes”, dijo. “Mi escuela realmente me está cuidando ahora”.

Tina Griego, una periodista de Colorado News Collaborative, contribuyó a este reportaje.

Jason Gonzales es un reportero que cubre la enseñanza superior y la legislatura de Colorado. Chalkbeat Colorado se asocia con Open Campus para su cobertura sobre la educación superior. Comunícate con Jason a jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois’ education budget might be tighter over the next several years, say officials

2023-12-14T00:23:17+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news.

The budget for public schools in Illinois might see some belt-tightening, officials signaled at the Illinois State Board of Education’s meeting Wednesday.

That’s because local revenue projections are modest and federal COVID relief dollars are set to run out, state finance and budget officials told board members.

The Governor’s Office of Management and Budget has predicted the Illinois State Board of Education can expect to receive an additional $425 million in revenue next year.

With $350 million of that funding going toward the evidence-based funding formula, “that leaves very little meat on the bone left to appropriate to other areas,” said Matt Seaton, the state board’s chief financial officer. “As we think about our budget for the next several years, I think we’re going to be thinking in terms of a conservative budget.”

The state board will likely have less funding for items such as transportation, private school tuition for students with disabilities, and Illinois’ free breakfast and lunch program.

Officials said it is possible that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker or the state legislature could allocate more than the board asks for, as happened this past year. The board asked for $510 million for fiscal year 2024, but received $601 million from the state.

The State Board of Education is expected to vote on a budget recommendation to send to the governor during its Jan. 24, 2024 meeting.

Many school districts will face a new financial reality during fiscal year 2025, which begins July 1, 2024 and ends June 30, 2025. Since the start of the pandemic, school districts across the district were flush with federal COVID-19 relief funds to help schools recover. Illinois received over $7 billion in funding. The largest pot of money that came under the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan is set to expire Sept. 30, 2024.

A data dashboard from the state board says districts have spent 74.5% of their emergency federal dollars as of Dec. 7, 2023. A majority of funding went to after-school programs to help students recover learning loss, tutoring, transportation, and existing staff. Out of the $7 billion, the state board kept $440 million for statewide recovery efforts including the Illinois Tutoring Initiative and professional development for educators. According to the dashboard, the state has only spent 66.5% of the money so far.

Illinois school districts are already bracing themselves for budget cuts. Chicago Public Schools, the state’s largest district, says it is expecting a $391 million budget shortfall next year.

The budget outlook isn’t an encouraging sign for education advocates, educators, and families who want to see more money going to schools. Those who testified at the state board’s budget hearings in October want to see an increase in funding in early childhood education, K-12 public schools, and social-emotional learning hubs among other issues, according to state officials on Wednesday.

Pritzker kept the education budget flat during the first year of the pandemic. Afterwards, Pritzker approved an increase of $350 million toward the evidence-based funding formula to support K-12 public schools — keeping the bipartisan promise made in 2017 when the formula was created. However, advocates have been pushing the state to increase funding by $550 million a year to fully fund schools by 2027.

Pritzker is pushing to expand early childhood education across the state during his second term. Most recently, he announced an effort to create a new agency that would bring together several departments that currently provide services for families with young children. Last year, he increased early childhood spending by $250 million, including a $75 million increase toward that state board’s early childhood block grant. Advocates hope the state will again increase funding by $75 million in next year’s budget.

In previous years, Pritzker has given his State of the State address and budget proposal in February before Illinois lawmakers go into the spring legislative session to negotiate what the final budget will be. It must be approved before the start of the next fiscal year on July 1.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Denver schools are investing in teaching techniques like finger breathing. Here’s what that means.

2023-12-08T00:18:06+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

Wednesday was a big day in Inmaculada Martín Hernández’s class. The students in her college-level conversational Spanish class at Denver’s North High School were conducting a Model United Nations presentation, and their teacher sensed they were nervous.

So after Martín Hernández went over the objective for the day, but before the students paired off to strategize, she led them in an exercise called finger breathing.

Gripping her right thumb with her left hand, she instructed the students to do the same.

“Inhale,” she told the students in Spanish. “Hold. Exhale.”

She repeated the exercise for all 10 fingers.

Quick mindfulness breaks are a staple in Martín Hernández’s class. They are also part of a growing number of strategies, including free virtual and in-person therapy, to address student mental health needs that were amplified by the pandemic. The finger breathing lesson is courtesy of a Denver-based nonprofit organization called Upstream Education that provides bite-sized well-being lessons for middle and high school students.

North High was one of the first schools to use Upstream, which is now in more than 40 Denver public schools, according to Upstream Executive Director Tessa Zimmerman.

After seeing Upstream in action, school district leaders decided to spend just under $60,000 in federal pandemic relief to partly fund that expansion, said Bernard McCune, the executive director of extended learning, athletics, and activities for Denver Public Schools. The Caring for Denver Foundation, funded with voter-approved tax dollars, is also backing the expansion.

“You can’t leave a school that’s doing Upstream and not be impressed,” McCune said.

Zimmerman started Upstream because she herself had anxiety as a child and panic attacks at school. That changed when she got a scholarship to a private high school where the principal led the students in mindfulness activities every day during homeroom.

Those activities changed her life, Zimmerman said. “I changed from a student who hated going to school to a student who loved to go to school,” she said.

When Zimmerman was in college, she realized the inequity of her experience: She had access to mindfulness activities at her private school, but many other students did not.

So Zimmerman came up with an idea for a social and emotional learning curriculum for teenagers, and in 2016, entered a design contest run by the DPS Imaginarium, the district’s former in-house innovation lab, which the district dissolved in 2019 due to budget cuts. Zimmerman won $9,000 from DPS that helped her start Upstream.

For the past seven years, the organization has refined its tools with the help of students, including a 10-student task force that Upstream pays during the summer to review a couple dozen of its lessons with an eye to making them more relevant. Teachers have provided feedback, too.

“We found from teachers that they really wanted to do this work, but if they had a 30-minute lesson, it was not feasible,” Zimmerman said.

So Upstream made all of its lessons 10 minutes or less. The finger breathing lesson clocks in at 4 ½ minutes. Another lesson meant to teach students to show themselves grace is 7 ½ minutes. In it, students briefly write down a challenging moment they had recently and then listen as their teacher reads phrases like “I am not alone” and “I can restart my day over at any time.”

The lesson plan includes a script for what teachers should say next: “You can recite these phrases to yourself in the middle of class or during a performance — whenever you need some reassurance or a moment of self-compassion.”

North High School teacher Brandi Garcia sits behind her laptop, which has an Upstream "box breathing" sticker on the front.

North High teacher Brandi Garcia started using Upstream in 2020 during remote learning and continued using the tools when students came back to her classroom in person. She said she loves that they are “super easy to follow. It’s plug and play.”

After students do an Upstream exercise, Garcia said, “they feel a lot lighter.” She’s noticed that even students who are resistant at first eventually come around.

“There’s some kids that are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this,’” she said. “Then before you know it, they’re right there with the breathing. Then they’re like, ‘Are we going to breathe today?’”

North High social worker Maria Hite uses Upstream with students in her therapeutic groups and in her one-on-one sessions. Posters with Upstream techniques hang in her office, which features soft lighting, a box of fidget toys, and a mini Zen garden with a rake.

On Wednesday, Zimmerman handed Hite a stack of square stickers. The stickers, which were an idea from Upstream’s student task force, have a bumpy texture and instructions for how to do the “box breathing” exercise, which involves tracing a finger around the edge of the square and breathing in for four seconds on one side and out for four seconds on another.

Hite revealed her own box breathing hack: She has students flip their cell phones screen-down and trace their phones with their finger.

“A lot of my time is spent working with students who are anxious,” Hite said. “If you can show a tool that works really quickly, it’s easier [to get] buy-in.”

Spanish teacher Martín Hernández said she likes that the exercises create “that moment of connection, even when not all the students want to do it.

“But everyone is calm and quiet, and everyone respects it.”

On Wednesday, junior Audrey Gilpin was among the students who took part in the finger breathing exercise. Gilpin said it’s nice to come into Martín Hernández’s classroom from the chaotic hallway of the 1,600-student high school and take a few minutes to pause. It’s a small respite that several students said improves their own mental health and helps them feel more comfortable in class.

“It makes me feel like my teacher cares about how I feel mentally,” Gilpin said.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

How Colorado used COVID early childhood aid to spark innovation

2023-12-06T00:23:57+00:00

Much of the federal relief aid sent to Colorado’s child care providers during the pandemic helped keep doors open and businesses solvent.

But one small stream of federal COVID funding — $23 million — was used for innovation in the sector rather than its survival. That money was distributed through the CIRCLE Grant program and helped fund more than 200 projects around the state. The projects included weekly bilingual preschool classes for Armenian-American children, a training program for Head Start parents working as classroom aides, and a loan program to help child care employees cover emergency expenses.

While the grant funding represents a fraction of the $678 million in federal COVID relief sent to Colorado’s early childhood sector, program leaders are proud of the grassroots efforts it sparked.

“Once again, we are seeing that folks that are closest to the problems have the best solutions,” said Jennifer Stedron, executive director of Early Milestones Colorado, which distributed the CIRCLE grants.

The yearlong grants ranged from $10,000 to $300,000. Many of them focused on making child care more accessible to families. In some cases, that meant creating new infant and toddler classrooms or sending mobile preschools to underserved neighborhoods. In others, the goal was to better meet specific needs, say, by adding programs for bilingual students or children with disabilities.

The nonprofit Armenians of Colorado Inc. used its $35,000 CIRCLE grant to pilot a free Saturday preschool class that incorporated both English and Armenian. A dozen children attended the program last spring at the First Baptist Church of Denver, some who didn’t know a word of Armenian and some who spoke only Armenian. They listened to poems and stories in Armenian and also did activities in English, including one on the Easter bunny.

The idea was to “show the kids you can use both languages to have academic and social interactions,” said Simon Maghakyan, an activist in the Armenian community and a CIRCLE Grant consultant for Armenians of Colorado. “It’s important they see value in both.”

Some of the children, who ranged in age from 2 to 5, had never attended any kind of preschool, he said. For most, it was “their first introduction to either language in the written form.” The two languages have different alphabets.

The Armenian community has deep roots in Colorado, with some of the earliest immigrants arriving in the late 1800s. Statewide, there are about 5,000 people of Armenian descent. The Armenian Genocide during the World War I era, as well as more recent displacements, have gradually brought more Armenians to the United States and Colorado.

But it’s still a relatively small group, and because of assimilation pressures and the dominance of English globally, it can be a struggle to maintain the Armenian language, Maghakyan said. That’s why the Saturday preschool program is important. The CIRCLE grant supplied only enough money to plan and run a three-month pilot, but leaders with the organization hope to find a way to keep it going in the future.

Besides funding new programming for children, many CIRCLE grant projects focused on supporting the chronically underpaid early childhood workforce with increased wages, training, or other benefits.

The Denver nonprofit WorkLife Partnership used its CIRCLE grant to offer a program that’s usually available to employers for a fee to child care providers free of charge. The program helps employees quickly access small loans at a lower interest rate than payday lenders would charge.

The process is simple: Employees struggling with a large or unexpected expense, such as a security deposit, utility bill, or car repair, can request a $1,000 loan through WorkLife with no credit check or collateral requirement. The money lands in their bank account in as little as 24 hours. They then pay back the loan through monthly payroll deductions over the course of a year. With interest and a $20 administrative fee, the total repayment on a $1,000 loan is $1,116.

Logan Jones, financial services manager for WorkLife, said, “it’s really designed to be an anti-payday loan.” It helps employees, especially those with bad credit, avoid exorbitant interest rates when they’re in crisis.

He said about 15 employees at two participating Denver area child care centers have taken advantage of the loans, most often for housing costs. Borrowers don’t have to say why they’re seeking the loan, but many do later in voluntary surveys, he said.

Jones said that although the loan benefit was offered free to child care providers through the CIRCLE grant, many didn’t take advantage of it because there were so many CIRCLE grant opportunities and offers at the same time.

“It needs to be staggered out longer,” Jones said.

Stedron, of Early Milestones, agreed that the one-year grant timeline was too short.

“I wish they could have gone on forever, certainly more than one year,” she said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Some NYC families struggle to use pandemic food benefits, as millions of dollars remain unspent

2023-11-15T00:08:41+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

Myrna Mangual, a parent coordinator at P.S. 35 in the Bronx, hears from at least 10 parents a week who are confused about how to access pandemic food benefits.

The benefits — known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT — went out to all public school families and others in New York City, with several installments issued since 2020. Intended to cover the costs of meals usually provided for free at school, the funds have been praised by advocates, who have called the program a lifesaver for many of the city’s struggling families.

But for some of the parents Mangual works with, the money hasn’t been easy to use.

Those families aren’t alone, as tens of millions of dollars in potential New York City benefits remain unused. In the city, families of at least 90,000 eligible children had not redeemed a recent allotment of the pandemic food benefits as of last month, according to state data previously shared with Chalkbeat.

Those funds, which total at least $35 million, could begin to expire after December if they continue to go unspent.

Some families at P.S. 35 never received their state-issued P-EBT cards, while others say they didn’t see certain disbursements added to their accounts. When calling the state’s P-EBT helpline, some parents say they’ve had trouble reaching anyone who can provide assistance, often stumbling on the automated responses or experiencing long wait times to speak to an agent, before eventually turning elsewhere for answers.

Mangual, however, said she doesn’t know how to help the families at her school — where more than 95% of students come from low-income backgrounds and nearly a quarter are English-language learners, according to city data. She said she’s never received training on how to guide families through using the benefits.

“This is where my frustration comes from,” she said. “We know nothing.”

In total, New York’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, or OTDA, has issued $6.3 billion in P-EBT benefits, with about 60% going directly to SNAP households with existing EBT accounts, while others received the funds on state-issued P-EBT cards.

The state maintains detailed P-EBT information on its website and operates a phone helpline at 1-833-452-0096. OTDA officials said they’ve provided information on each phase of the benefits to the state’s Education Department, which then distributed that information to local school districts.

The city’s Education Department said it has promoted information about the benefits on its website as well as on social media, and referred families with questions to OTDA.

Still, parents, schools, and community organizations say there’s been a disconnect, and many families aren’t receiving the information they need to take advantage of the benefits. Difficulties accessing the funds come as the need for them is especially high.

Nearly 75% of New Yorkers felt it was harder to afford groceries than a year prior, while more than half worried they would be unable to pay their food costs if faced with an unexpected $500 expense, according to a survey conducted by No Kid Hungry New York in April.

Stephanie Wu Winter, a senior program manager for No Kid Hungry, stressed the urgent need for the benefits.

“We’re glad these programs are being stood up and recognize it’s no small task to administer them,” she said in a statement. “But there’s a clear opportunity to increase outreach to families and give them direct lines of communication to understand what benefits they’re eligible for and when they’ll receive them. There’s time to get this right, but only if we move quickly.”

Education consultant David Rubel wants to see ramped up publicity before it’s too late, fearing the unspent money could be roughly $46 million across the two most recent disbursements.

“Parents did not know they had more P-EBT dollars coming due to minimal publicity,” said Rubel, who obtained the data on unused benefits through a public records request.

Families say it’s hard to get help

Carol Jackson, a Queens parent, said she received a text message in July notifying her that she’d soon receive a P-EBT card in the mail, but it never arrived.

As a SNAP recipient at the time, she should have seen her P-EBT benefits added directly to her existing account, but Jackson added she wasn’t sure whether the benefits were ever provided there, either.

She tried calling the helpline, but couldn’t get through to an agent, she said.

Meanwhile, Lynn Lu, a Manhattan parent and professor at the CUNY School of Law, said she experienced difficulties accessing the benefits last year on one of her children’s P-EBT cards, after they switched schools. She tried calling for assistance to check the balance on the card or figure out how to get it replaced, but wasn’t able to get a clear answer.

As part of her work at CUNY, she teaches a law school clinic where they represent clients in maintaining public assistance, like SNAP. But even as a member of listservs discussing such benefits, Lu said she was only “dimly aware” that another disbursement of P-EBT funds had rolled out this fall.

“It does raise this question of: How is word getting out to the general public?” she said, adding she couldn’t recall her children’s schools ever saying anything about the pandemic food benefits.

All families with valid phone numbers on file with their school district should receive a text message whenever new benefits become available, according to state officials. But some families said they never received such messages, even if they got initial notifications about their P-EBT cards.

In a statement, Anthony Farmer, a spokesperson for OTDA, said the agency has “worked tirelessly” to distribute the benefits to millions of residents across the state.

“The agency also conducted extensive public outreach and worked closely with advocacy organizations across the state to ensure eligible families are aware of these benefits and could take steps to redeem them,” he said.

More recent allotments will continue to be sent out to families through the end of December — including the at least $391 per child sent out for the summer of 2022 and the 2021-22 school year, as well as the $120 per child distributed for the summer of 2023 — according to OTDA.

One school reports widespread issues

Officials at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens say families at the school have not received P-EBT funds since the first disbursement in 2020. The school, which receives free meals through the city’s Education Department, serves students who are deaf from across the five boroughs.

Lori Glick, a social worker at the school, said families desperately need the extra support.

“There’s not enough food at home,” she said. “From the minute the announcement is made, they’re waiting for this money.”

State officials did not comment on the school’s specific situation, but said that not all children were eligible for all phases of P-EBT. For example, some of the allotments were based on COVID-related absences during the school year. Officials urged families with questions to call the P-EBT helpline.

Staff at the school said they remain unsure why families haven’t received more recent allotments of benefits.

“Honestly, it makes it look like we’re not doing something,” said Laura Cruz, the school’s director of pupil personnel services. “The families, they work with us, but then they get a little frustrated like, ‘What is Lexington not doing?’ And I don’t know if there’s something that we’re not doing.”

Community organizations report language barriers, other challenges

Both the P-EBT helpline and OTDA website offer information in languages other than English. Callers to the helpline can receive assistance from either an agent who speaks their native language or through an interpreter, while information posted online can be translated via a function at the bottom of the webpage, officials said.

But for some families with limited proficiency in English, using the benefits remains a constant struggle, said Wei Zhang, a program supervisor at the Chinese-American Planning Council.

Zhang works primarily with Chinese American families in Brooklyn who have children with disabilities and who have faced unemployment or been limited to part-time work since the onset of the pandemic. Many parents that he works with speak little English, making it hard for them to seek out help.

There’s been consistent confusion about how to activate P-EBT cards, how to use the benefits, and when more funds will be added, said Zhang, who has had to translate information about the benefits for families.

P-EBT can be particularly essential for those who earn just enough to be ineligible for SNAP benefits, added Mary Soriano and Sindy Rivera, senior case managers at WHEDco, a community development organization in the south Bronx.

“Pretty much all of their income is going towards rent, utilities, or child care,” Soriano said of the families they work with. “The pandemic EBT, as well as regular SNAP benefits, is what helps them feed their family — their children — every single day.”

But the vast majority of families they work with speak limited English, and some do not have consistent access to phones or computers, further complicating their ability to learn about and access their benefits.

Confusion surrounding the benefits has also been exacerbated by scams intended to steal them, like skimming or phishing, Zhang said. He’s seen families in Brooklyn lose their P-EBT benefits to such scams.

State officials have advised all EBT card holders, including P-EBT cardholders, to “remain vigilant” about potential scams. Taking basic precautions — like carefully inspecting point-of-sale devices, changing PINs regularly, and reviewing transaction history often — can help protect the benefits.

While the state received federal approval to replace stolen SNAP benefits in some circumstances earlier this year, P-EBT benefits are not eligible for replacement under federal guidelines, officials said.

Other states face P-EBT distribution issues

New York isn’t the only state to face hurdles in getting families to spend the federal benefits. In Maine, distribution of P-EBT cards this year spurred confusion among families and some school administrators. In California, nearly $1 billion in benefits remained unspent as of July. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, more than 14,000 families had their cards deactivated by mistake in 2021.

Benefit scams, too, have occurred across the country.

Though some families in New York City have encountered difficulties, most stress the benefits remain important.

Mangual, the parent coordinator, said she wished there were more avenues for parents to seek help. If schools had a point person to turn to for answers within their district, for example, it would be far easier to assist families, she said.

To Lu, the Manhattan parent, one of New York’s strengths during the pandemic was a pre-established “expectation that everyone is going to be able to get nutrition assistance through school, without any stigma.”

“That message is great,” she said. “But even when you do something helpful, there’s still going to be glitches.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

No, 1,000 Colorado child care programs are not about to close

2023-11-03T23:24:15+00:00

The headlines started appearing in July and August: A child care catastrophe was looming.

Nearly 1,100 Colorado child care programs would shutter and 83,000 young children in the state would lose care after federal COVID aid expired in September, according to projections from a national think tank.

The numbers were part of a state-by-state forecast put out by the left-leaning Century Foundation in June, intended to sound the alarm about the impact of lapsing funds — the so-called child care cliff. But Colorado officials say the nightmare scenario described in the report won’t come to pass.

“This is not at all what we are seeing in any shape or form,” said Mary Alice Cohen, director of the office of program delivery at the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

Several factors explain the disconnect between the alarming Century Foundation projections and Colorado’s on-the-ground reality. State officials say they chose to spread COVID relief money for early childhood — about $678 million from three federal packages and $45 million from the state — among many efforts with various expiration dates. At the same time, the state’s new universal preschool program is sending new money into the sector, and some communities are beginning to tap novel funding streams, like lodging taxes, for child care.

State leaders also want to continue COVID-era strategies that made the biggest impact.

“We are going to go after federal grant funding,” said Cohen. “We’re going to work with foundations to see which ones they want to pick up and continue.”

Meanwhile, some experts have raised questions about the Century Foundation’s methodology, suggesting the numbers of potential closures are significantly inflated. The group’s analysis relied on a 2022 survey that asked child care providers whether they would have closed during the pandemic without the help of COVID aid. It didn’t ask about the likelihood they’d close after the pandemic ended and the aid expired.

Julie Kashen, the lead author of the Century Foundation report, during a recent webinar for journalists, hinted that the numbers in the report were meant to push lawmakers to act.

“Congress pays attention to things that are scary. Like, I wish that wasn’t the way of the world but it is,” she said.

Kashen went on to say that while mass child care closures are a real possibility, they’re not a foregone conclusion, and that if they occur, they will happen “slowly and over time.”

Providers knew COVID aid was short term

When the pandemic hit, Jennifer Knott’s child care center in the western Colorado city of Rifle received an influx of COVID aid. The money paid for new handwashing sinks and air filtration systems, gloves, and cleaning supplies. It also helped make up for enrollment losses and covered the cost of the additional staff needed to comply with COVID-era health rules.

Jennifer Knott operates child care centers in Rifle and Grand Junction.

“The funding was instrumental in allowing us to make the adjustments that were required to stay open,” she said.

But by the time the funding ran out more than a year ago, enrollment was back up and the center had mostly returned to pre-COVID procedures. Knots, who recently opened a center called Adventure Academy in Grand Junction and has plans for a second one on the same site, said while her margins are thin, her finances are stable.

She wondered if providers facing dire consequences because of expiring COVID aid, “are people that maybe are not running their child care centers efficiently.”

“I’m not sure why people would be experiencing that,” she said.

Leaders of some early childhood councils, which are regional groups that support child care businesses, said while providers benefited greatly from federal money, they knew it was temporary.

“We really haven’t heard the rumblings of, ‘If that goes away, I’m going to close,’” said Stephanie Bivins, director of the Mesa County Partnership for Children and Families, an early childhood council.

Sarah Romack, executive director of the Chaffee County Early Childhood Council, said local providers have “always known it’s one- or two-time funds.” As those dollars run out, she said, “I don’t think they are gonna beat down our doors, like, “What happened?”

In addition, nine of 12 providers in the county participate in the universal preschool program, which means a monthly payment from the state at rates that, for some, are about the same or higher than what they charge in tuition.

Romack said along with the influx of COVID aid, the pandemic put a magnifying glass on long-standing problems in child care, a field notorious for low pay and high turnover.

“We’re starting to have more conversations about compensation and benefits than we ever did before,” she said.

Today, there are glimmers of progress. A Chaffee County lodging tax passed last year will fund a new grant program for child care providers. Local leaders are also talking about building two new child care centers — one in a planned housing development and the other in a housing complex for senior citizens.

Child care still doesn’t pay for itself

For Mary Nelson, executive director of Denver Cooperative Preschool, the federally funded stabilization grant she received during the pandemic did exactly what it was meant to do — shore up her program during a time of financial uncertainty.

She used it to offset a rent increase, pay extra cleaning costs, and beef up end-of-year staff bonuses.

“All of that funding provided a little relief,” she said. “The relief has gone away, but the stress and pressure still exist.”

The true cost of child care exceeds the amount most parents can pay, and as Nelson found out recently, what the state can pay.

She’d hoped to participate in the state’s universal preschool program, but the reimbursement rate was too low — it would have caused an annual shortfall of $85,000. As a result, she didn’t join, and ultimately lost some preschool families and their tuition dollars.

But Nelson doesn’t want to compromise the center’s long-standing priorities, including placing three teachers in every classroom and offering the best staff pay and benefits possible.

“It sometimes makes me wonder how long we can sustain some of these ideals,” she said.

Dora Esparza, the director of business services for Denver’s Early Childhood Council, said many child care providers in the city constantly struggle because they’re “basically selling a service at a financial loss.”

She said of the expiring COVID aid, “I don’t think it’s going to push them over the brink, but I think it’s a return back to being on the brink. That is just the day in the life of [early childhood education] providers.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Datos muestran que más de 90,000 estudiantes de NYC no han usado los recientes beneficios alimentarios por la pandemia

2023-10-30T12:08:35+00:00

Suscríbete al boletín diario y gratuito de Chalkbeat New York para mantenerte al día sobre las escuelas públicas de Nueva York.

Read in English.

Las familias de más de 90,000 niños elegibles en la ciudad de Nueva York no han canjeado los últimos beneficios alimentarios por la pandemia, según datos obtenidos por Chalkbeat.

Esto significa que por lo menos $35 millones en beneficios potenciales siguen sin utilizarse y podrían caducar a principios del año que viene, haciendo que los neoyorquinos pierdan los fondos federales.

Los fondos, conocidos como Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT), se han otorgado en varios pagos desde 2020 para ayudar a cubrir el costo de las comidas para las familias cuyos estudiantes usualmente recibir comidas gratis en la escuela. Como las escuelas públicas de la ciudad de Nueva York ofrecen comidas universales, todas las familias son elegibles sin que importen los ingresos familiares.

Este año, el estado distribuyó múltiples rondas de fondos, incluyendo $120 por niño para el verano de 2023, así como al menos $391 por niño para el verano de 2022 y el año escolar 2021-22. (Pero los fondos de este último pago podrían ser de hasta $1,671 por niño según las ausencias relacionadas con el COVID o los días de aprendizaje remoto durante el año.)

En total, el estado ha emitido otorgado unos $5,400 millones en beneficios P-EBT desde 2020, con alrededor de un 60% de los beneficios otorgados directamente a familias de bajos ingresos que reciben beneficios federales a través del Programa de Asistencia Nutricional Suplementaria, o SNAP.

Los defensores han elogiado el programa por proporcionar un apoyo fundamental en todo Nueva York, especialmente cuando los efectos de la pandemia fueron una carga adicional para las familias en dificultad económica.

Pero entre las familias que no reciben SNAP, más de 90,000 estudiantes de la ciudad no habían usado los fondos del año escolar 2021-22 ni la asignación del verano 2022, de acuerdo con los datos estatales compartidos por el consultor educativo David Rubel y confirmados por la Oficina de Asistencia Temporal y por Discapacidad del estado (OTDA).

De las familias que recibieron tarjetas P-EBT por primera vez, 41,271 no habían gastado nada de los fondos. En cuanto a los que ya tenían tarjetas P-EBT, 49,465 tampoco habían usado los beneficios todavía.

Liz Accles, directora ejecutiva de Community Food Advocates, expresó su preocupación por la alta cifra de familias que aún no habían usado los fondos. A ella le preocupa que algunas hayan encontrado dificultades para usarlos, mientras que otras tal vez no sepan que los tienen o decidieron no usarlos.

Para muchos habitantes de la ciudad, el programa P-EBT ha sido un “salvavidas”, añadió.

“La gran mayoría de las familias de las escuelas públicas de Nueva York tienen dificultades económicas, y el costo de los alimentos es alto para todos”, dijo Accles. “Nuestra esperanza es que todos usen los beneficios”.

Rubel obtuvo los datos a principios de este mes solicitándolos en virtud de la ley Freedom of Information del estado, ya que le preocupaba que muchas familias podrían no saber que hubo pagos recientes, especialmente las no dominan bien el inglés. Él dice que ha seguido de cerca las noticias del P-EBT, pero que no estaba al tanto de pago del verano de 2022 hasta que se topó con un artículo de Chalkbeat al respecto.

“Si yo no lo sabía, ¿qué tal las familias del otro millón de niños de nuestro sistema escolar público?”, dijo él, y añadió que le preocupaba que muchas familias hayan perdido o tirado a la basura sus tarjetas P-EBT. “Hay mucho dinero sobre la mesa”.

Todos los hogares con números de teléfono en los archivos de su distrito escolar debieron recibir notificación por SMS cuando los beneficios estuvieron disponibles, según la OTDA. Las personas que estaban recibiendo los beneficios por primera vez recibieron instrucciones adicionales sobre cómo activar y usar sus tarjetas P-EBT. Las familias reciben otro texto si los beneficios todavía no se han usado seis meses después de recibirlos, según los funcionarios estatales.

El Departamento de Educación del estado también envió mensajes sobre los beneficios a todos los distritos escolares de Nueva York, añadieron los funcionarios.

De todos modos, las familias que no se hayan enterado de las ayudas, las hayan olvidado o aún no las han usado, todavía están a tiempo de usar los fondos de las asignaciones recientes.

Esto es lo que las familias necesitan saber:

¿Quién es elegible?

Todas las familias con hijos de K-12 que asistieron a las escuelas públicas de la ciudad durante el año escolar 2021-22 fueron elegibles para los beneficios de alimentos de ese año y el verano de 2022. Los que asistieron a la escuela el año pasado también fueron elegibles para recibir el beneficio del verano de 2023. También fueron elegibles las familias de los estudiantes en escuelas chárter, privadas, de otro tipo y programas de Pre-Kinder, que también reciben de comidas gratis a través del programa federal de almuerzos.

Las familias fueron elegibles sin importar su estatus migratorio.

¿Cómo se distribuyeron los beneficios?

Las familias que reciben beneficios del programa SNAP, de la Asistencia Temporal estatal o de Medicaid, recibieron sus pagos directamente en esas cuentas.

Todas las demás familias elegibles recibieron los fondos en una tarjeta P-EBT, que se expidió con su primer pago de beneficios.

¿Cómo puedes conseguir un reemplazo de tu tarjeta P-EBT estatal?

Los que hayan perdido su tarjeta P-EBT pueden obtener una de reemplazo llamando al 1-888-328-6399.

No hay fecha límite para solicitar una tarjeta de reemplazo, según los funcionarios estatales. Pero si necesitas una, los funcionarios sugieren pedirla lo antes posible.

¿Para qué sirve la P-EBT?

Los beneficios solamente se pueden usar para comprar alimentos.

¿Cuándo caducan los beneficios?

Los fondos P-EBT están disponibles para las familias por 274 días después de recibirlos, o aproximadamente unos nueve meses.

Cada vez que una familia gasta parte de los fondos, el saldo restante es válido durante otros 274 días, según las autoridades estatales.

¿Por qué deberías usar los beneficios?

Todas las familias deben usar los beneficios, no importa su situación económica, dijo Accles.

Los beneficios P-EBT, al igual que los cheques federales de estímulo que se distribuyeron durante la pandemia, le proporcionan beneficios a la comunidad que van más allá de los alimentos que compran, añadió. Aunque los fondos pueden ayudar a cubrir las compras del supermercado y otro gastos para comer, usarlos también es un estímulo para la economía local.

“Esto tiene un doble propósito”, dijo Accles. “Usar esos dólares nos ayudará a todos.”

Julian Shen-Berro es un reportero que cubre la ciudad de Nueva York. Para comunicarte con él, envíale un email a jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools could see a $391M budget deficit next school year, official says

2023-10-25T21:59:31+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and statewide education policy.

Chicago Public Schools is expecting a $391 million budget shortfall next year as federal COVID relief money runs out, officials said Wednesday.

The district has received $2.8 billion in COVID relief since the onset of the pandemic. The last $300 million of that will be spent in 2025, according to Mike Sitkowski, chief budget officer for CPS, who shared the figures during a Board of Education meeting. The current budget is $9.4 billion. Next year’s budget starts July 1, 2024 and will cover the 2024-25 school year.

By law, the school district must balance its budget, Sitkowski noted. That means district officials will either have to cut expenses or find a way to boost revenue. Board President Jianan Shi called for the latter.

“Our district needs more revenue, and this is a moment for all of us at every level to stand up and advocate for our teachers, our students, our families, for this board to advocate for more revenue at the state, local, and federal levels,” Shi said after the presentation.

The financial update comes as the City Council holds budget hearings for the city’s next budget, which is due by the end of the year but is typically finalized by Thanksgiving. The district’s budget operates on a different timeline, more closely matching the school year. The district will also hold budget community roundtables for the public throughout November. (Dates can be found here.)

Districts across the nation have been bracing for financial challenges as their pandemic relief dollars run out. Chicago officials have directed their relief dollars toward employee salaries, hiring more instructional staff and creating several new programs. About $670 million of federal relief was included in this year’s budget — representing about 7% of the current budget set to end June 30, 2024.

Asked on previous occasions about what CPS will do once the federal money runs out, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez has said district officials plan to ask the state for more support.

The $391 million deficit is the result of complicated collection of revenues and costs the district is projecting for next year: First, the district will have a $670 million hole in next year’s budget due to the loss of federal pandemic aid, according to Sitkowski’s presentation. That gap will be partially filled by the last bit of federal relief — about $300 million. However, the district is also expecting $123 million more in expenses it says it can’t control, including for teacher pension costs, debt service, health care costs, and inflation, Sitkowski said.

Those costs will be partially offset by rising revenues of $102 million, which include $23 million more from the state, as well as some rising tax collections, and more state support for pensions, according to Sitkowski.

The projections shared on Wednesday seem to outpace what a previous analysis warned of. A report issued under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned of a potential $628 million deficit by 2026 and predicted a neutral outlook for 2025. The report also noted that as the city has shifted more costs onto the district, it could shoulder more expenses as the board goes from mayoral control to an elected body.

District officials have been ratcheting up pressure for more money from state officials. This school year, CPS is projected to see a $23 million increase in state funding, for a total of about $1.77 billion this school year.

But on Wednesday, Sitkowski said that if the state fully funded districts under the Evidence-Based Funding Formula, CPS would have an additional $1.1 billion in funding.

Last month, the board highlighted the need for $3.1 billion to address critical repairs at school facilities over the next five years.

Sitkowski said direct funding at the school level has also increased by $1 billion since fiscal year 2019, even as enrollment dipped. More than 2,300 teachers were hired in that time, including classroom teachers, interventionists, and educators for the arts and physical education, he noted.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

With federal COVID money running out, advocates urge state education officials to boost 2025 budget

2023-10-06T01:22:00+00:00

The Illinois State Board of Education kicked off the process of crafting budget recommendations for the 2024-25 school year at the first of two virtual meetings Thursday night.

With the deadline to spend federal COVID relief money approaching, lobbyists, superintendents, school teachers, and advocates made the case for board members to ask Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the state legislature to beef up the education budget with at least a $550 million increase in what’s called “evidence-based funding” — a way of allocating additional state money that’s supposed to take into account student needs and lessen the disparity between districts that have affluent tax bases and those that don’t.

The state is supposed to increase evidence-based funding by $350 million each year with the goal of getting all school districts adequately funded by 2027. Lawmakers have done so every year since 2018, but the pandemic derailed one such increase in 2020. As a result, advocates argue that lawmakers need to boost that number to $550 million in order to meet the same funding level at a time of increasing costs for school districts and as federal pandemic relief dollars run out.

Chicago Public Schools already forecast a $628 million deficit by 2026, and district officials have called on the state to ramp up the amount of money it puts into K-12 education.

Vanessa Espinoza, a parent of three CPS students and a member of Kids First Chicago, a nonprofit advocacy group, argued that Illinois’ current education system shows deep disparities between affluent and low-income districts. But the quality of a public education “should not be determined by their zip code,” Espinoza said, advocating for the extra funding boost. “I have seen teachers struggling to make ends meet. You can make a profound difference in the lives of countless children and families across the state.”

The virtual meeting on Thursday evening was the second gathering this week, coming after ISBE held its first in-person meeting in Springfield. Christine Benson, chair of ISBE’s Finance and Audit Committee explained that testimony during the public hearings helps inform the budget recommendation it will make to the governor and state lawmakers in January 2024.

“We want to know what investments would make the biggest difference for the students and educators in each community,” said State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders in a statement last month. “Advocacy matters and truly makes a difference in how state funds are allocated.”

Advocates at the hearing also called for funding boosts to early child education, after school programs, career and technical education programs, and agricultural programs in K-12 schools. Last year, Pritzker added $75 million to early childhood education as part of a four-year plan called Smart Start Illinois to expand preschool and child care. Some who spoke Thursday supported the continued increases.

In May, state lawmakers passed a $50.6 billion state budget that allocated $10.3 billion to education. That included a $350 million increase to be distributed to K-12 school districts through evidence-based funding.

Chicago was expecting to get $27 million of that increase. But new calculations posted on the Illinois State Board of Education website show that the state is allocating $23.3 million of the increase to CPS. The drop in Chicago’s share of new state education money is partly due to a loss of low-income students and an increased property tax base.

Although state education funding has been increasing since 2017, many argue that Illinois still has a long way to go to make school funding more equitable.

Diana Zaleski, a lobbyist for the Illinois Education Association, lauded efforts so far to close the gap between the wealthiest and poorest districts in the state.

“We still have more work to do,” Zaleski said, as she urged board members to recommend a roughly $800 million increase per year in evidence-based funding to meet state goals of bringing all districts to a level of “adequacy” that would dispel an old image of Illinois ranking toward the bottom of public education funding.

Jill Griffin, superintendent of the Bethalto School District about an hour’s drive south of Springfield, said she remembers a time when the district was facing “catastrophic cuts” with only 28 days of cash on hand “in large part because of inadequate funding from our state.”

Since Illinois adopted the evidence-based formula in 2017, Bethalto is at 71% adequacy and “back on solid financial footing,” Griffin said. But with more money going to minimum wage increases for school staff, higher wages for teachers, and other state mandates, “this progress is inadequate.”

ISBE will hold another virtual public budget hearing on Oct. 30.

Michael Gerstein is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

Michigan school districts brace for Count Day ahead of ESSER spending cliff

2023-10-02T21:31:14+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.

Wednesday’s official student headcount for Michigan schools could be more crucial than ever, as districts where enrollment has declined since the pandemic began are now facing the expiration of federal COVID relief.

The federal aid known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, helped schools weather the pandemic in several ways. Some districts used a portion of that aid to cushion the fiscal blow from enrollment losses. But ESSER funds will run out in September 2024, and in response, districts could be forced into some budget cuts in the near future as long-term enrollment drops persist.

The stakes are high across the nation, including in Michigan, where the pandemic accounted for more than half of the 9% decline in statewide student enrollment over the past decade, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. In Michigan, where enrollment is tied to school funding, each student leaving local public schools could cost a district nearly $10,000 in annual funding without the backstop of COVID aid.

The end of ESSER funding could be especially challenging for high-poverty districts, which have typically received more federal relief and spent their funds at a slower pace than their more affluent counterparts.

And the end of federal COVID relief is approaching as students continue to struggle, both academically and emotionally, from the pandemic.

The end of ESSER money could on its own drive down funding significantly in many districts in Michigan and elsewhere. A national analysis estimates that on average, the loss of the federal pandemic funding will cause a drop in revenue of about $1,000 per student.

“There’s certainly more question marks than there are exclamation points at this point when it comes to where this is going to go,” said Robert McCann, executive director of K-12 Alliance, an organization that represents school superintendents across Michigan. “Every superintendent right now is looking at their budget, and trying to figure out how to best maintain some of those programs that were created during the pandemic.”

Michigan enrollment declines exacerbate spending cliff

School systems across Michigan were provided roughly $6 billion through ESSER that districts used for a variety of programming families wanted. Districts like Flint Community Schools that lost students throughout the pandemic also used ESSER funding to counteract the loss of state aid that followed enrollment declines.

No more ESSER dollars means Flint and other districts can only rely on that strategy for so long. Although that funding hasn’t run out yet, districts will use Wednesday’s student count to help determine their budgets for the 2024-25 school year.

COVID funding “has allowed us to have a fund balance to cushion us for the next couple of years,” said Kevelin Jones, Flint’s superintendent.

“We need every dime that we can get our hands on,” Jones said. “When you’re losing 50 to 100 students every year, it means that we can not properly staff and meet the needs of every one of our scholars.”

Jones added: “Once this fund balance is gone, we are back in the same situation that we were in prior to the pandemic of being in the red.”

The district has lost 66% of its student population, or roughly 5,700 students, in the past decade.

Alena Zachery-Ross, who has led Ypsilanti Community Schools since 2018, said high-poverty districts like hers are in dire straits. Ypsilanti saw a 280-student dip in K-12 enrollment at the start of the 2020-21 school year. The district is also still making up for the loss of students who left for neighboring districts in the wake of a district consolidation in 2013.

“For those of us who really need that additional support, who benefit by having social workers in every building, instructional coaches in every building, climate and culture coaches in every building, we use those [Count Day] dollars to provide those extra supports that are needed,” said Zachery-Ross.

Michigan counts students on two official days during the school year, this Wednesday and Feb. 7. District principals have led a daily attendance campaign in anticipation of Wednesday, and have sent letters home to families reminding them of Count Day’s significance.

Budget cuts can be especially challenging in districts that used ESSER money to maintain staff and programming that they would not have been able to afford otherwise.

This summer, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, Michigan’s largest school district, moved to cut and consolidate central office and support staff to make up for a loss of 2,000 students during the pandemic. DPSCD enrolled roughly 50,000 students pre-pandemic.

Heading into Wednesday, DPSCD is budgeting for at least 48,200 students, according to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. The district is tasking its principals with creating their own Count Day plans, and they have received additional funding for those activities.

“You really go to any school during Count Day, you will see something different happening,” Vitti said at a DSPCD meeting on Monday. “We have to be realistic with how that drives funding and to make that a unique type of day for students.”

In some places, the cuts could extend beyond staff and programming. Districts like Flint and Grand Rapids Public Schools, where there’s been a 20% drop in enrollment over the past decade, have recently weighed whether to close underutilized schools in the coming years.

Some school leaders with rosier enrollment statistics or projections argue the ESSER spending cliff is no more daunting than the challenges cash-strapped districts have contended with before.

For the first time in over a decade, Coloma Community Schools may see a bump in enrollment according to preliminary figures ahead of Count Day, said Superintendent Dave Ehlers, who leads the rural, high-poverty school district on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The end of ESSER, he said, won’t come as much of a loss for his district, which enrolls roughly 1,300 students. Most of the district’s dollars went toward providing new technologies and social-emotional learning.

“I think we’re gonna be in a good spot,” Ehlers said. “We’ve invested well and made sure that we did good things with it, but we’re prepared to go with our regular school budget and be okay.”

Stiles Simmons, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools outside of Detroit, said financial belt-tightening has kept the district of nearly 1,500 students afloat amid previous enrollment losses. This past year, when the district gained 91 students, the district’s corresponding increase in state aid went directly to build up the district’s general fund balance.

How badly districts are faring enrollment-wise may also guide lawmakers’ decisions regarding next year’s school aid budget.

This summer, lawmakers approved a $21.5 billion budget that raised the state’s per-student allowance by nearly $500 and boosted funding for at-risk students and special ed services.

“What we’re hoping is that the legislature is going to look at that budget that got passed this year and say ‘That needs to be the baseline going forward, not an exception that we’re going to start scaling back from,’” McCann of K-12 Alliance said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Indianapolis Public Schools expands virtual tutoring during the school day after some success

2023-09-18T11:00:00+00:00

Indianapolis Public Schools is expanding its virtual tutoring efforts to reach more students during the school day after some of the district’s most underperforming schools saw positive growth on the state ILEARN exam from the program.

The virtual tutoring offered by Tutored by Teachers expanded this school year from 11 of the district’s chronically underperforming elementary “Emerging Schools” to 22 out of roughly 40 traditional IPS schools.

Principals were able to opt into the program, using it to fulfill one of several needs: support for vacant classroom teaching positions in math, English, science, or social studies, SAT prep for high school students, and intervention for students at a certain achievement level, according to Tutored by Teachers.

The expansion means the district is leaning even more heavily into one of its largest efforts to recover from pandemic learning loss, with help from federal coronavirus relief funds. Roughly 2,755 students will now get tutoring during the school day, according to Tutored by Teachers, up from last year’s figure of over 1,200.

IPS is also relaunching Tutoring for All, an after-school virtual tutoring program also offered through Tutored by Teachers, which has garnered just over 2,000 students so far.

School districts around the country have turned to high-dosage tutoring to help students recover from pandemic-era learning loss, although the efforts in the country’s largest districts have only reached a small fraction of students. IPS has embraced the tutoring offered through Tutored by Teachers, which offers small-group instruction during the day by certified educators from all over the country.

This year, the tutoring offered during the day at participating schools in IPS can vary by school site, said Tutored by Teachers co-founder Rahul Kalita.

“It requires some strategic thinking and effort for the entire leadership team of a school to think through, ‘Who do we want to target?’” Kalita said.

The expansion also means some students may be getting double doses of tutoring — one session at school and another at home.

Robin Hill, who signed her fourth grade daughter up for after-school tutoring, was surprised when she learned last week that her daughter will also get tutoring during the school day at George Washington Carver Montessori School 87.

Math is her daughter’s strong suit, Hill said, but she struggles with English and struggled with reading when the pandemic hit in her earlier elementary years.

“I love it,” she said of the news of tutoring expansion. “Absolutely love it. Because she needs it.”

IPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Data from Tutored by Teachers shows positive results

Data analysis from Tutored by Teachers indicates both during and after-school tutoring showed some promising academic results.

Emerging School students who participated in more than 20 hours of tutoring on average grew more on the ILEARN assessment in math and English than students who did not, according to the company’s analysis. Those students grew by about 14 more points on ILEARN in math and 12 in English.

And students who participated in more than 10 hours of after-school tutoring in the Tutoring for All program also grew more in math and English than their non-tutored counterparts from fall to spring, according to another analysis of seven of the 11 Emerging Schools.

Funding for Tutored by Teachers has been one of the district’s largest expenditures from its federal pandemic relief coffers.

The district spent roughly $4.3 million out of its roughly $217 million in federal relief dollars on Tutored by Teachers from the start of last school year through March 31, according to records of the district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund spending.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools hired hundreds of tutors with federal COVID money. Can they keep them?

2023-09-18T10:30:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and statewide education policy.

A. Philip Randolph Elementary School parent Victoria Wicks has hair as vibrant as her personality. Last week it was colored a bright teal, but she changes it up frequently — sometimes picking a color requested by the students she tutors.

The mother of eight, with children ranging in age from 10 months to 16 and including twins, is deeply involved at Randolph in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. Six of Wicks’ children currently attend the school and she’s on two parent councils.

On a recent Friday, Wicks sat across the table from a student and gave instructions in a practiced, serious tone. This exercise would assess what level of tutoring the girl would be placed into for the rest of the school year.

Once the reading of passages and sight words was over, Wicks let her nature shine to the fullest, telling a student, “Good job! That’s what I’m talking about!”

Wicks became a tutor during summer 2021, when a fellow parent invited her to join Randolph’s contingent of the Chicago Public Schools Tutor Corps. The district had earmarked $25 million in federal pandemic relief money to hire and train 850 tutors to help kids catch up on much-needed early reading and middle- to high-school math skills.

Wicks took on the job of reading tutor with her trademark enthusiasm, rehearsing how to teach the lessons and give assessments, using the curriculum provided. She found success helping her tutoring groups read better.

But across the district, the corps got off to a slow start. Only 450 tutors were hired by halfway through the 2021-22 school year. Onboarding was slow and it took a few months to get the curriculum providers — Amplify for reading, Saga Education for math — under contract and training tutors.

Since then, the number of tutors has grown. On the first day of school, CPS had more than 600 tutors, about three-quarters of the initial hiring goal of 850. Currently, tutors are working in 229 schools, but the district declined a request to provide a list of the schools and their locations.

A summer hiring push helped schools, including Randolph, staff up, some principals said. But this school year marks the final year the district will have federal COVID relief funds to spend on tutors before the dollars run dry next fall.

Chicago’s tutoring is high-quality but small scale

According to district officials, Tutor Corps has reached 10,000 students with at least one tutoring session since its 2021 launch. Like many districts nationwide, Chicago’s program aimed to provide students “high-dosage” tutoring, which means students meet in a group of no more than four with the same tutor over an extended period of time, like a semester or a full school year. The intensive sessions are 30 minutes during the school day, at least three times a week.

The tutors must be trained to use a structured curriculum that can meet students where they are and offer lots of chances to practice the skills they are learning. Research shows this kind of tutoring benefits struggling students the most.

Meeting these exacting requirements can be tough. Other districts have struggled to make it work, but Chicago has stayed true to it from the beginning.

At Randolph, tutors meet with no more than three students up to five times a week. Principal Keviyona Smith-Ray also makes sure tutors have time to meet with the teachers of the students they are tutoring.

“CPS is doing something we’re not really seeing across the United States,” said Maryellen Leneghan, vice president of district partnerships for Saga Education, which provides training and curriculum for the math tutors.

She said Chicago’s uniqueness is threefold: The district has chosen to keep tutoring fully in person, maintain control of tutor hiring, and balance strict adherence to the model with flexibility for schools.

“The number of students it has been able to help has been impressive,” said Becky Betts, chief marketing and external affairs officer for A Better Chicago, which has financially supported tutor hiring.

But 10,000 students is barely a drop in the bucket for a district of more than 300,000 students, said Natasha Dunn, a CPS parent and Black Community Collaborative co-founder.

Though data on the tutor corps’ effects has yet to be made public, a study from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab is expected later this school year.

While kids learn, schools develop teacher talent

Like many tutors, Wicks had the same students all year last year and got to know them well, even attending a parent-teacher conference for one of them to show how much the child had progressed over the year.

As a parent herself, she has seen some of her own children grow as readers through tutoring, and she uses what she’s learning as a tutor to help them at home.

“Being with Tutor Corps helps them understand how to break down the words,” she said. ”When it’s time for them to go into that classroom and read, they’ll use the strategies we have taught them.”

Smith-Ray said the tutors are also building relationships with students beyond their academic sessions and helping them open up about tough issues in their lives.

She’s also seen an unexpected perk: Two of last year’s tutors have joined the permanent staff — one as a special education classroom assistant and the other as an office assistant.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to hire within the community,” said Smith-Ray. “The students want to be with them. They’re familiar with them.”

The six tutors who are part of CPS Tutor Corps at Haugan Elementary in Chicago’s Albany Park. The school’s co-principal, Heather Yutzy, said the program has become a helpful hiring pipeline for the school.

Across town, at Haugan Elementary in Chicago’s Albany Park, co-principal Heather Yutzy said Tutor Corps is becoming a “stepping stone” into teaching or other permanent jobs. At Haugan, one of last year’s tutors has moved into student teaching. That tutor’s younger sister, a recent graduate of Northeastern Illinois University, is now tutoring and planning a career change to go into teaching.

Northeastern is among a group of local colleges, led by Roosevelt University, that is creating a tutor-to-teacher pipeline. A Better Chicago awarded $1.6 million to Roosevelt University to build a tutoring pathway in partnership with other local higher ed institutions. According to A Better Chicago, about 65 Roosevelt students completed a full year of tutoring last year. Of them, seven Roosevelt students are moving into student teaching this year and another 10 students are expected to move into student teaching in fall 2024.

Getting sold on the program and finding the money

Though hard data on Tutor Corps’ effectiveness is not yet publicly available, tutors and principals can see early signs of progress on the ground.

Haugan parent Rita Tello joined the corps in the middle of last year as a math tutor. She has worked hard to help struggling middle schoolers see math as both challenging and fun.

Her groups broke into two-on-two teams to take Kahoot quizzes and play Jeopardy-style math games, often with a small prize for the winners.

Though not every student’s math grade improved, she could see growth based on their “exit slips” — a quick, weekly progress check — and a difference in their attitude toward math.

She said her students were skeptical of her and reluctant to do math at the start. But by the end of the year, she said, they were eager to come to tutoring. They would ask her, “Are you picking us up today? Are you picking us up tomorrow, Ms. Tello?”

At Randolph, Smith-Ray said one of the most obvious signs of improvement in math is that children know their multiplication facts fluently and no longer need a times table reference with them in classroom small groups.

She said the youngest students are the most likely to outgrow the need for tutoring quickly, because many of the entering kindergartners had little preschool experience with pre-reading skills to learn sounds and letters.

Smith-Ray added that tutoring has also helped identify students who need individualized education programs, or IEPs, for special education services and provided “clear data” to help case managers and teachers “make sure students were given what they needed.”

However, for most students, Smith-Ray said continued tutoring will be key, “[They] are meeting their growth targets. They’re just still not at grade level yet.”

Not all students see linear progress. Barbara Formoso Minarik is the grandmother of alumni of James Monroe Elementary in Logan Square and has been part of the Tutor Corps since it started. Over the past three school years, she has seen children bounce in and out of tutoring.

Formoso Minarik wonders if some of her students need more support than tutoring can offer, like a referral for special education services. But that’s not a quick fix. “It’s just a long process,” she said.

It’s also a long process for a school district to embed and sustain a program like Tutor Corps. It can take about five years, said Leneghan, with Saga Education.

“Every year you learn more and more and build your capacity,” she said.

Chicago, like districts nationwide, doesn’t have much more time. The federal deadline to spend COVID recovery money is next September.

In a statement, the district said it “values this program and is exploring ways to continue providing these foundational services even after all federal [COVID]dollars are expended by September 2024.”

Whatever district officials decide, the principals at Randolph and Haugan want tutors like Wicks and Tello to continue their work.

“If I had to use my budget, I would still keep Tutor Corps,” said Smith-Ray. “It may not be six people, maybe it’ll be four, but I would still employ them.”

Yutzy, the Haugan co-principal, is just as determined.

“I’m totally sold on this program,” she said. “I think it has been a 100% valuable experience.”

Maureen Kelleher is a freelance journalist and longtime education writer. For Chalkbeat, she has previously written First Person pieces about choosing a new school for her daughter and helping migrant students enroll in school. Kelleher is now the editorial director at Future Ed, an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Schools face a funding cliff. How bad will the fall be?

2023-09-13T15:13:30+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

It’s an ominous phrase that is top of mind for many school district officials: the “funding cliff.”

This refers to the imminent end of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief money that schools have been relying on during the pandemic. “The feds pushed a lot of money into the K-12 system,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University. “Now the districts are being weaned off of that funding — they’re losing that shock absorber, that cushion.”

This has educators and experts nervous: the money might be gone before students have fully recovered academically and could lead to painful layoffs and other budget cuts. Some schools have already begun cutting back on recovery programs including tutoring, summer school, and extra staff, like college advisors.

But what is not yet clear is how steep the fall from the funding cliff will be. That’s because there are many other factors that will shape school budgets, including money from other sources. Plus, schools are making spending choices now that could lead to bigger or smaller cuts later.

What we do know is that high-poverty schools face a bigger cliff, that more federal money won’t be forthcoming, and that school budgets will be shaped both by districts’ own financial decisions and those made by state politicians. How precisely this plays out could affect classrooms and students for years to come.

Here, Chalkbeat offers a guide to the federal school funding cliff and what factors will make or break school budgets after the federal money runs out.

Schools got a lot of federal money, but it’s running out — and no more is coming

Schools have received a large infusion of federal money since the pandemic: roughly $190 billion or close to $4,000 per student.

The money was meant to address the consequences of the pandemic on schools, including learning loss. In practice, local officials had wide discretion over how to spend it. Money from the final pot has to be earmarked by the end of September 2024 (though schools can seek an extension for when that money is actually spent). The latest data shows that schools still have funding left, but are on track to use it all by the deadline.

Some advocates had hoped that even more federal dollars would be on the way. For instance, the Los Angeles teachers union had sought to make federal relief permanent. But this is not going to happen. The recent deal that President Joe Biden struck with Congressional Republicans limits new federal spending on education for the next couple years.

In sum, the infusion of temporary federal money really will be temporary. Once it’s spent, it’s gone.

High-poverty schools got more federal money, so face a steeper cliff

The COVID relief was not spread evenly across schools. Nationally, districts in more affluent areas received just over $1,000 per student, with some getting even less. High-poverty districts, on the other hand, got over $6,000 per student. A handful of very high poverty districts, like Detroit, received massive sums of money. There was also variation from state to state, with schools in the South getting more federal money as a percent of their total budgets.

This means that some schools will face little or no funding cliff while others will face steep cliffs. “Districts serving our neediest kids have further to fall,” noted a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution.

The scope of cuts will depend on how schools have chosen to spend federal money

“A lot depends on how prudent they were in their use of the federal funds,” said Taylor. “Federal funds should have been interpreted as one-time money.”

It’s clear that a good chunk of the funding was indeed used for one-time expenses: HVAC and other building upgrades, personal-protective equipment for COVID, bonuses for staff.

Detroit, for instance, earmarked over half of its COVID relief for long-deferred facilities upgrades. “One thing that I’ve tried to do as superintendent is be disciplined with finances,” superintendent Nikolai Vitti recently told Chalkbeat. “I always think about recurring revenue with recurring expenditures, and one-time revenue with one-time expenditures.”

On the other hand, at least some districts have used COVID money for ongoing operating costs like paying teachers’ salaries and maintaining buildings. State data show that schools have been adding staff in recent years. As federal aid runs out, layoffs might follow.

There’s also a third, mushier category: supplementary expenses that schools have added to try to make up for learning loss or address other needs. Those might include expanded summer school programming, after-school tutoring time, vendor contracts, temporary new staff. Some have already begun cutting. Detroit eliminated some positions like college transition advisors. Districts in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Reno, Nevada have cut back on tutoring.

As the funding cliff approaches, these recovery add-ons may start to vanish even more rapidly. This programming may be easier to cut because it’s not part of core instruction, but could still be painful to lose, especially when students remain behind academically.

Generous state or local funding could cushion the fall

The biggest chunk of education funding comes from states, and they have been increasing spending on schools of late. One recent analysis found that most states have increased education spending in their budgets this year, often by substantial amounts. Last year, California passed a record state budget, which included a one-time $7.9 billion learning-recovery grant to schools, on top of the one-time federal aid.

If state funding continues to increase, districts could be protected from major cuts even as federal money dwindles.

David Lauck, CFO of Alliance College-Ready, a charter network in Los Angeles, says he’s not expecting immediate cutbacks thanks to funding increases from California. “We do not anticipate any major dropoff in programming,” he said.

More local funding could also help cushion schools. Officials in Kansas City are planning to use higher property tax revenue to keep some of the staff they added with federal aid. “We’ve done the work so we can retain them,” said Jennifer Collier, the superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. “The cuts were not as deep as we originally thought.”

But states could soon face budget challenges, limiting their ability to help schools

States governments also received a separate $195 billion worth of temporary federal money. This has supported the generous education funding for schools, but it also means states face their own funding cliff. Moreover, many states are projecting that revenue from state taxes will decline next year.

“With more fiscal data coming in, the long-term health of state budgets looks murky,” concluded Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate with the Urban Institute.

That could create a double whammy for schools: federal funds run out and states don’t have the ability to provide an additional buffer. Once again, high poverty schools are more at risk because they tend to be most reliant on state funds. Local funding is also not a guaranteed backstop. The higher-poverty schools that face the greatest fiscal cliff typically have less property wealth to draw from.

The budget situation will likely vary by state. A number of Republican-leaning states have adopted tax cuts and private school choice programs, which could strain state budgets.

But there is some good news for public schools. States have built up substantial “rainy day” funds that could bolster budgets. Plus the broader economy, contrary to some predictions, is looking relatively strong. That’s a more promising indicator for state revenue, since a strong economy tends to mean higher funding from sales and income taxes.

Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor and school finance researcher, says he suspects the upcoming funding cliff won’t be as bad as what happened after the Great Recession, when schools made deep cuts after federal aid runs out. But he said this will vary from place to place and that schools are to some extent at the mercy of state politicians.

“A lot of these cliffs are going to be a function of state choices,” said Baker.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

A dozen Chicago Public Schools employees ousted over federal PPP loan fraud

2023-09-06T18:05:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and statewide education policy.

A dozen Chicago Public Schools employees have resigned or been fired after the district’s inspector general found they fraudulently obtained federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.

The loans — most of which did not need to be repaid — were available to businesses during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to help them stay afloat. Federal officials have since said the PPP loan program lacked controls and was “susceptible to fraud.”

All but one of the ousted CPS employees earned six-figure salaries and worked year-round positions.

“We’re talking about people who have full-time, year-round jobs with CPS,” Inspector General Will Fletcher told Chalkbeat Wednesday. “How they were able to have fully fledged side businesses was obviously going to be a question.”

The inspector general’s report does not name the employees. According to the report, one of them was a central office administrator who inflated how much they made on a side business in 2020 in order to get a PPP loan and also did not report that secondary employment to CPS.

Other cases include:

A district regional administrator making $165,000 a year created a fake business in order to get a $20,000 PPP loan. The money was deposited in their personal checking account and spent within two months on “expensive luxury items” and a trip to Las Vegas, bank records obtained by the inspector general showed.
A school administrator with a side business selling clothing admitted to inflating its income in 2019 in order to get two PPP loans totaling $40,000. The clothing business earned “at most $7,500,” but they claimed it earned $100,000.
An administrator making more than $120,000 a year got a $20,000 PPP loan by paying someone to fill out the application and report they made $100,000 as an independent contractor in 2019.

The inspector general’s report cites two additional employees whose dismissal cases are pending. The district said it has filed dismissal charges against them, but both cases are being litigated.

In a statement, a CPS spokesperson said the district is reviewing a recommendation by Fletcher that future employees be required to report any PPP loan they’ve received as part of the onboarding process.

“We take seriously our responsibility to serve students and families with integrity and we will hold accountable individuals who breach CPS policies and the public’s trust,” the spokesperson wrote.

Fletcher said his office opened a broad investigation into PPP fraud in 2022 and started by searching a public database that lists all PPP loan recipients. In all, 780 district employees showed up in the data as having obtained PPP loans, the OIG report said.

“We’re not presuming that all 780 loans were fraudulent,” Fletcher said, noting some CPS employees do have legitimate side jobs outside of school and during the summer. There may also be cases of identity theft. While the investigations are continuing, the report released Wednesday focused on cases involving higher-level employees and those who worked year-round positions.

“We’re looking at employees who have some level of supervisory authority or who are in positions where they have some kind of control over sensitive information, financial information, dealings with the contractors and vendors,” Fletcher said. “People who are in positions of trust in the district.”

Other investigations have also turned up evidence of misused funds related to the pandemic. The inspector general found most bus companies that were given “good faith” payments to keep paying drivers during the switch to virtual learning in March 2020 laid off their workers despite taking the money.

“PPP fraud is just one facet of what has concerned us related to pandemic fraud,” Fletcher said.

Fletcher said his office has the capacity to continue investigating these and other pandemic-related fraud and waste allegations, but noted there is a “lack of information” around much of the COVID relief money distributed by the federal government in the past few years.

Chicago Public Schools has received more than $2.8 billion in COVID recovery money from the federal government under three Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief packages passed by Congress.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Hundreds of Las Vegas and Tampa area schools drop Paper’s online tutoring

2023-09-06T16:35:12+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Hundreds of schools in two of the nation’s largest districts have stopped offering online tutoring through the company Paper following questions about quality and cost.

Hillsborough County schools in Florida dropped Paper altogether, while around 150 schools in Clark County, Nevada decided not to work with Paper this school year, according to district records obtained by Chalkbeat.

“After evaluating usage rates, return on investment, and student achievement data, we decided not to renew the contract,” Tanya Arja, a Hillsborough County schools spokesperson, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat last week.

Paper has lost other major clients recently, including Boston Public Schools, which cut ties with the virtual tutoring company this summer, a year earlier than expected, after a small share of students used the virtual tutoring.

The cutbacks come as many districts are evaluating which academic strategies to keep — and which to toss — as they head into the final full school year to spend billions in federal COVID relief dollars. The decisions indicate that at least some educators have grown disillusioned with Paper and perhaps opt-in virtual tutoring more broadly.

Some districts are instead investing in regularly scheduled virtual or in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, following the high-dosage model backed by research.

Paper’s online tutoring practices under scrutiny

COVID funding helped fuel significant growth for Paper, a company that landed contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to offer virtual tutoring to more than three million students in districts across the U.S. and Canada. Demand for the company’s services soared during the pandemic as many schools looked to get extra help to their students and had new money to spend.

But Paper has come under scrutiny from Chalkbeat and others for often failing to deliver the one-on-one expert help that the company advertises to schools. Some younger kids and struggling students have found the tutoring platform — which looks like a text-based instant messenger with a digital whiteboard — difficult to use. Some districts previously cut ties with Paper after a small share of students logged on for help.

Recently, the company has laid off many of its corporate staffers and tutors, and several top executives are set to depart this month.

In an email, Ava Paydar, a spokesperson for Paper, declined to comment on the changes Hillsborough County and Clark County are making. “We will defer comment to the school districts,” Paydar wrote.

In previous interviews, Paper CEO Philip Cutler defended the quality of Paper’s tutoring, and said the student experience on the Paper platform is always one-on-one because tutors work with students in an individual session — even if tutors are juggling multiple students at once. It’s uncommon for students to be matched with tutors who are unfamiliar with their subject, he added.

Cutler also said that Paper has worked to boost student usage by training teachers and conducting outreach to students and families.

Hillsborough County schools, which serve the area around Tampa, had previously paid Paper around $4 million over the last two years to offer virtual tutoring to 110,000 students in middle and high school. When the district renewed its contract last year, it did so at a reduced price, after raising concerns about low usage. The district had said it would drop Paper if too few students used the tool — and evidently followed through.

Boston school officials cited similar concerns. “For the number of students it was reaching for its cost and our assessment of how it’s been working, Paper has not been worth it,” Max Baker, a spokesperson for the district, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat last month.

Clark County had planned to spend $6.6 million to offer Paper in every school this year, district records show. Schools were told to come up with a plan to get every student in grades 3 to 12 to log on early in the school year.

But the Las Vegas-area district did an about-face shortly after Chalkbeat published an investigation in July that found Paper tutors are often juggling multiple students at the same time and working in subjects they don’t know well — leaving many students frustrated and without needed help. Instead of requiring schools to use Paper, Clark County principals were given the option to keep working with the company or to stop. The schools that opted out serve 102,000 students, or around a third of the district.

Clark County schools appears to have taken public reporting into account while making its decision to cut back on Paper’s services.

The day Chalkbeat published its investigation, a top school official shared the story with Clark County’s superintendent, Jesus Jara, according to emails obtained through an open records request. A few hours later, Jara asked a top academic officer to come see him, then added: “We may need to review this contract and move some funds to FEV Tutors.”

A few weeks later, the school board approved spending $4 million on FEV Tutor, another virtual tutoring company that, like Paper, relies on text-based chat and a digital whiteboard, but has the added feature of live audio for students to speak to their tutors.

In an email, a Clark County schools spokesperson said the district had “reallocated funds previously designated for Paper Tutoring services to include an additional option, FEV Tutor,” but would not say how much the district is now spending on Paper.

Paper also lost a contract with the state of New Mexico earlier this year, after education officials there said the company had failed to get academic help to enough students.

But many other school districts are maintaining their relationship with Paper, which still holds contracts with the states of Mississippi and Tennessee, and several large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and Palm Beach County schools in Florida.

The Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada agreed to pay Paper up to $2 million to offer virtual tutoring to middle and high school students this school year and last year. The district recently cut back on paying teachers to tutor students after school, justifying the move with the addition of Paper.

“With the introduction of Paper on-line tutoring, in-person tutoring has been reduced,” spokesperson Victoria Campbell said in an email.

In Clark County, Spanish teacher Carmen Andrews will continue to have access to Paper at the Nevada Learning Academy, where she teaches students online.

When Andrews tried the tool last year — a district requirement — she found that some of her high schoolers waited a long time to be paired with a tutor, and some were matched with tutors who didn’t speak Spanish but tried to help anyway.

(Paydar, the Paper spokesperson, said the company always has Spanish tutors available, though acknowledged that mismatches can occur. “While very rare, we find that this type of experience can happen when a tutoring session starts with a focus on one area and then crosses over to Spanish as a subject,” Paydar wrote.)

Andrews sees some value in the kind of virtual support that Paper offers, especially for students whose parents work late in the Las Vegas hospitality industry. This year she’s planning to use Paper to give students extra feedback on written assignments in Spanish. But she’s glad the district gave schools the choice to opt out.

“If a school sees no use for it,” she said, “why pay the money for them to have it?”

Matt Barnum contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools are cutting recovery programs as U.S. aid money dries up. Students are still struggling.

2023-09-06T04:01:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get essential education news delivered to your inbox.

DETROIT – Davion Williams wants to go to college. A counselor at his Detroit charter school last year helped him visualize that goal, but he knows he’ll need more help to navigate the application process.

So he was discouraged to learn the high school where he just began his sophomore year had laid off its college transition adviser — a staff member who provided extra help coordinating financial aid applications, transcript requests, campus visits, and more.

The advisers had been hired at 19 schools with federal pandemic relief money. In June, when Detroit’s budget was finalized, their jobs were among nearly 300 that were eliminated.

“Not being able to do it at this school is kind of disappointing,” Williams said in August at a back-to-school event at Mumford High School.

An unprecedented infusion of aid money the U.S. government provided to schools during the pandemic has begun to dwindle. Like Williams’ school, some districts are already winding down programming like expanded summer school and after-school tutoring. Some teachers and support staff brought on to help kids through the crisis are being let go.

The relief money, totaling roughly $190 billion, was meant to help schools address needs arising from COVID-19, including making up for learning loss during the pandemic. But the latest national data shows large swaths of American students remain behind academically compared with where they would have been if not for the pandemic.

Montgomery County schools, the largest district in Maryland, is reducing or eliminating tutoring, summer school, and other programs that were covered by federal pandemic aid. Facing a budget gap, the district opted for those cuts instead of increasing class sizes, said Robert Reilly, associate superintendent of finance. The district will focus instead on providing math and reading support in the classroom, he said.

But among parents, there’s a sense that there remains “a lot of work to be done” to help students catch up, said Laura Mitchell, a vice president of a districtwide parent-teacher council.

Mitchell, whose granddaughter attends high school in the district, said tutoring has been a blessing for struggling students. The district’s cuts will scale back tutoring by more than half this year.

“If we take that away, who’s going to help those who are falling behind?” she said.

Districts have through September 2024 to earmark the last of the money provided by Congress in three COVID relief packages. Some schools have already started pulling back programming to soften the blow, and the next budget year is likely to be even more painful, with the arrival of what some describe as a “funding cliff.”

In a June survey of hundreds of school system leaders by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, half said they would need to decrease staffing of specialists, such as tutors and reading coaches, for the new school year. Half also said they were cutting summer-learning programs.

As the spending deadline looms, the scope of the cuts is not yet clear. The impact in each district will depend on how school officials have planned for the aid’s end and how much money they receive from other sources.

State funding for education across the country has been generous of late. But states may soon face their own budget challenges: They also received temporary federal aid that is running out.

Many school officials are bracing for the budget hit to come. In Shreveport, Louisiana, officials say that next year they might have to cut some of the 50 math teachers they added to double up on math instruction for middle schoolers.

Schools there added the teachers after identifying deep learning gaps in middle school math, and there’s evidence it helped, with a 4-point increase in math scores, officials say. But at a cost of $4 million, the program will be in jeopardy.

“Our money practically is gone,” Superintendent T. Lamar Goree said.

Some researchers have questioned whether the money was sufficient or sustained enough to address the deep declines in learning. But with a recent deal limiting federal spending increases in education, more money from Congress will not be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers and commentators have pointed to anemic academic recovery to suggest schools didn’t spend the COVID relief money wisely in the first place.

Experts note that district officials had wide discretion over how to spend the money, and their decisions have varied widely, from HVAC upgrades to professional development. “Some of the spending was very wise, and some of it looks, in hindsight, to have been somewhat foolish,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University.

To date, there is limited research on whether the federal money has helped address learning loss. One recent study of eight districts’ summer school programs found no impact on reading scores but improvements in math. Since only a fraction of students in each district attended, this made only a small contribution to learning recovery, though.

School officials insist the money has made a difference.

“I wonder what the counterfactual would have been if we didn’t have the money,” said Adriana Publico, the project manager for COVID relief funds at Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada. “Would students have been even worse off? I think so.“

The Washoe system has cut hours for after-school tutoring in half this year and eliminated teacher coaches from many elementary schools. The district just finished a dramatically expanded summer school program, but officials aren’t sure if they’ll be able to afford to continue it next summer.

Some school systems are trying to maintain COVID-era additions. In Kansas City, Missouri, district officials say they’re planning to keep a number of the positions that were added with federal money, including intervention teachers and clinicians who work with students who have experienced trauma. The district will be able to do so, said CFO Erin Thompson, because of higher property tax revenue.

“This might not be as bad as what we thought,” she said. “We’re optimistic at this point.”

In Detroit, which received a windfall of federal COVID money, district officials say they budgeted carefully to avoid steep cuts when the money runs out. This included earmarking more than half of their federal relief — some $700 million — for one-time building renovations to aging campuses across the city.

But ultimately, officials said some reductions were necessary. Expanded summer and after-school programs have been phased out, in addition to the hundreds of staff positions, like the college advisers.

“In an ideal world, I would rather have college transition advisers,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “But it’s another example of making hard decisions.”

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Barnum reported from New York and Binkley reported from Washington, D.C.

Detroit public schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti speaks on budget cuts, academic recovery

2023-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.

As federal COVID relief dollars for education begin to run out, school systems across the country are facing a jolt to their finances. But the Detroit Public Schools Community District has fared better than many in limiting the impact of the funding loss.

The district hasn’t been immune to cuts: Hundreds of positions were eliminated, the community has criticized district decisions, and parents remain concerned about the loss of some programs. But it deliberately focused most of the $1.27 billion it received from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, on one-time costs — rather than recurring budget items that can’t be sustained without federal aid.

That strategy will save the district from a so-called funding cliff that many other school leaders may soon face when the federal dollars run out in September 2024, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an interview with Chalkbeat.

Vitti talked about what he thinks the district did right and his recommendations for other school leaders.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the district’s strategy as you planned for the loss of the federal COVID relief money? What did you prioritize?

One thing that I’ve tried to do as superintendent is be disciplined with finances. … I always think about recurring revenue with recurring expenditures, and one-time revenue with one-time expenditures.

Boards, in particular, can be very vulnerable to spending one-time funding in a recurring way. Because of the concentrated poverty that our families face, you look at our outdated infrastructure, salaries that are not fully competitive, the wraparound services that our kids need — and all of that was magnified and exacerbated because of the pandemic.

So the normal challenges that we have as a district linked to concentrated poverty, linked to historic racism, you see that money and it’s like, “Wow, we can solve a lot of our problems,” because we’ve been talking about the need for revenue, because our kids need more than the average student.

When we paid for things that needed more people, we tried to rely on contracted services rather than increasing employment.

One focus of the dollars was let’s fill the revenue gap because of the loss of enrollment. Right when the pandemic hit and the first year we came back, we were down about 3,000 students. We’ve picked up some since.

(We kept everyone employed) that normally would have been laid off. You know, let’s not close schools, let’s not cut programming — that’s the last thing we want to do during the middle of the pandemic.

We funded things that were very specific to COVID, like masks, temperature check machines, ventilation systems, COVID testing, moving to smaller class sizes in order to have social distancing, the virtual school, nurses in every school, expanding mental health in all schools — we did all of that through contracted services, or it was one-time. There were things we did that weren’t linked to contracted services like expanding summer school.

About half of the dollars went to fund facilities, which was a clear one-time expense, one-time need, and an enormous gap in our district, which is that we have a $2 billion infrastructure problem with no revenue to solve.

There is a way to use the money to, for example, increase salaries, but you have to do it through bonuses if you’re going to be responsible. If you link it to salary increases, you’re going to hit a cliff.

Was getting kids back into classrooms in person with things like smaller class sizes, masks, hazard pay for teachers, and upgrading HVAC systems a focus to improve academic outcomes in the long run?

I think if we go back to the pandemic, the greatest sense of urgency I had was to get kids back in school, without a doubt. That literally kept me up at night and led to my own mental health issues. I did deal with mental health issues, because I didn’t feel like we were serving children the way they needed to be served. … Our children in particular needed in-person learning in order to continue to show the improvement we were definitely showing before the pandemic. I knew every day they were at home, we were getting farther behind.

2021-22 was the first year that everyone tested on M-STEP, and we really saw the impact of the pandemic that year. But in 2021-22, DPSCD showed less learning loss on average than the state of Michigan and less learning loss than city charter schools. That showed me that having this urgency of getting back in person and keeping schools open in that 2020-21 year was important (along with) fully implementing our curriculum online.

Which cuts were the most difficult to make, and which programs do you wish could continue but had to end due to the end of ESSER funding?

I never want to be the superintendent that has to reduce staff to get to a number, because I understand that there’s a human being behind it, and that human being is connected to a family. It’s never easy for me.

The next hardest decision probably came to not having summer school at the scale that we had before.

We heard from some parents and students that the loss of college transition advisers is disappointing. Do you wish the district could keep those positions?

What we said was, we have to protect direct impact on student achievement, so we definitely protected the classroom. We didn’t increase class sizes. We definitely have invested in our academic interventionists and even expanded them.

When looking at the college transition advisers, there’s no question they had an impact on children — no doubt about that — but not a direct impact on student achievement.

What we tried to do was convince college transition advisers to go into the On the Rise Academy program and become counselors, because that was something we could see expanding in future years, maybe with more (state money for at-risk students).

Did you anticipate the amount of criticism from the community you received about the cuts? Has it been difficult to communicate to the community that the end of some of the programs and resources funded by ESSER was due to the federal relief money expiring?

Detroit children have great need, and the school system in and of itself does not provide the resources that children deserve to be competitive with their peers in more affluent neighborhoods and school districts. That’s not a function of an incompetent, corrupt school board or superintendent. It’s the nature of how the schools are funded.

Although Gov. Whitmer has made strides in narrowing the gap between wealthy districts and DPSCD, the gap is still there. We not are not even equal yet. We are definitely not equitable.

People are very passionate about what we should be doing for our children. And there’s a sense of anger because our families know our children are capable.

What do you think other districts need to consider as they get to the point DPSCD reached last school year with the remainder of ESSER money being earmarked? What should they prioritize as those dollars run out?

My recommendation is to communicate often, frequently, and honestly about the advantages and disadvantages of the funding, and be upfront about how you’re spending the money.

DPSCD had less learning loss than our counterparts. And as we move into the 2023-24 school year, undoubtedly we’re narrowing the gap in performance, which means not only did we use the money effectively, we used it efficiently.

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado teachers can get up to $1,000 for classroom materials with new grants

2023-08-24T20:37:36+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to keep up with education news in Denver and around the state.

Colorado teachers can get up to $1,000 toward classroom learning materials. Offer good while supplies last.

Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova announced the grant opportunity — a partnership with the website DonorsChoose — at Westview Elementary School in Northglenn in the Adams 12 Five Star Schools district Thursday.

The money — $11 million in total — comes from federal pandemic relief money intended to help students recover from COVID learning disruptions. In their applications, teachers will have to describe how the materials will contribute to learning recovery. Examples could include equipment for science experiments, games and puzzles to bolster reading skills, or hands-on materials that help students learn multiplication or fractions.

Córdova said she knows teachers dig into their own pockets every year — sometimes to the tune of hundreds of dollars — to make their classrooms inviting and engaging places for learning. She said this grant complements other pandemic relief initiatives that aim to make bigger changes for lots of kids, such as paying for new curriculum or tutoring. By allowing individual teachers to apply for money, the state can match federal money to local needs and know the money “would go directly into classrooms.”

The money comes from the second round of federal pandemic relief. The state has until Sept. 30 to distribute that money.

“We know this will be very popular, and the funding probably won’t last very long,” Córdova said.

Second grade teacher Jenny Lage recalled a project she did last year in which her students used Play-Doh to build animal habitats that were displayed in a miniature art show. Her students loved it and learned a lot. They also had to make do with a single container of Play-Doh per child.

Having money to cover more materials means she can design more hands-on learning, and students stay more engaged, she said. It even means fewer behavioral problems.

Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Oklahoma have done similar projects with pandemic relief dollars.

To participate, teachers should go to the DonorsChoose Colorado Instruction Page. DonorsChoose will review requests. Qualifying applications will typically be funded in two to five days. DonorsChoose will withhold its suggested donation and sales taxes from the grant amount.

The application is open now, and requests will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis until the funding runs out.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

With COVID relief spending deadlines looming, Chicago suburb moves ahead with uncommon technology plan

2023-08-04T15:58:03+00:00

At a Dolton-Riverdale school board meeting in the spring, district leaders and two technology vendors pitched a $3.3 million tech overhaul.

They told the board in the high-poverty district in Chicago’s south suburbs that the project would “future-proof the classroom” and “catapult Dolton into the next generation of learning technology.”

A couple of members balked. They said they felt rushed to approve the deal and questioned why it had not been put out for a bid. But deputy superintendent Sonya Whitaker urged them to back the project that March evening, insisting that the district was staring down a deadline to spend a portion of its federal COVID relief money.

Out on Capitol Hill, she warned, the feds are “itching to take this money away from us.”

The board approved the deal 4-2. As a result, the district’s 1,900 elementary students will return later this summer to classrooms outfitted with multiple touch screens, motion-tracking cameras, and microphones — part of an uncommon plan to embrace hybrid learning.

Officials say the technology will boost attendance by allowing students who are sick or traveling to virtually join classmates, and will help with teacher shortages by letting an educator or a substitute teach two or more classrooms at a time.

The pressure felt by the Dolton board is hitting districts across the state as they face a Sept. 30 deadline to commit dollars from the second of three stimulus packages — and a year later, another deadline to spend the third, largest, and final installment of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, the unprecedented federal infusion of money to help schools recover from COVID.

In Illinois, districts have spent about 82% of the second relief package and almost 40% of the third one, said the Illinois State Board of Education.

With the clock ticking here and across the country, technology companies and other vendors are pushing products and services they claim can help speed up student recovery — and urging districts to invest in them now.

Data the state maintains on recovery spending does not explicitly break out technology, with more than half of expenditures so far categorized under the broad umbrella of “instruction.” But other districts have also spent heavily on devices, tech education products and more, including Chicago, where tech companies have loomed large in its outside vendor spending.

Jennifer Reczkowicz assists a student during a typing lesson at Lincoln Elementary School.

At least for now, Dolton-Riverdale Superintendent Kevin Nohelty said, the district will not move forward with a vision he had shared with Chalkbeat last year in which all students would learn remotely for a part of each week — one that some parents and experts have said they find concerning. Instead, the district will “start small,” allowing teachers to get the hang of the technology and letting students log in virtually only as needed.

In a district that, like many others, has struggled with absenteeism post-pandemic, the possibility of harnessing technology to address the issue sounds enticing. But simultaneously teaching students who are in the classroom and virtually is challenging, especially in the elementary grades Dolton serves.

Dolton officials wanted to prepare for another upheaval

Denise Sanders stopped by Riverdale’s Washington Elementary this week — and was surprised to see large interactive boards getting set up in all classrooms. Sanders’ younger granddaughter attends the school, where Sanders also helps out classroom teachers as part of a statewide parent mentor program.

“What’s this all about?” she asked a staffer in a hallway.

“We’re doing hybrid learning,” the staffer responded.

Dolton-Riverdale, whose student population is overwhelmingly Black and low-income, had been hit hard by the pandemic, with a steep jump in absenteeism and dip in state test results. Citing COVID fears and an online program officials felt worked well, the district had made the decision to remain fully virtual during the entire 2020-21 year, putting it in the minority of districts nationally.

Sanders says like other children, her granddaughters struggled to stay engaged during that virtual stretch. She recalls spending a good part of that 2020-21 year by her middle schooler’s side, making sure she remained focused on lessons and schoolwork on her laptop. She taught her younger granddaughter her ABCs and numbers, skeptical that the girl would get much out of virtual pre-kindergarten.

“It was really hard,” Sanders said. “A lot of kids are still behind.”

Nohelty, the superintendent, argues the pandemic was so disruptive because districts were unprepared for the abrupt shift to remote learning. And he believes the technology used for virtual instruction holds possibilities post-COVID.

So during the 2021-22 school year, as the district was returning to normalcy, Nohelty started eyeing a plan to embrace hybrid learning in the long run.

At one point, Nohelty envisioned dedicating the bulk of the district’s roughly $21 million in federal COVID relief to a hybrid technology plan, though he said more recently that he is earmarking about $5 million for it in the short term.

He said he wanted to ensure the district was ready for the next major upheaval. He also wanted to reimagine learning, with students perhaps attending in person three days and virtually two days each week.

That’s where Velocita Technology and ViewSonic came in.

Last year, the district hosted focus groups with representatives of Velocita, Dolton’s Joliet-based technology consultant, and ViewSonic, the prominent maker of touchscreens and other technology. They set out to show how ViewSonic’s interactive screens and its “COVID child” — a software platform that allows virtual students to interact with educators in the classroom, collaborate on assignments with in-person peers, and more — could help teachers deliver a new and improved version of hybrid learning.

District emails show Velocita reps nudging Dolton officials to move ahead briskly with the plan as leaders pushed back their presentation to the school board several times.

At the board meeting in March, Velocita and ViewSonic reps unveiled the “Flexible Classroom Learning & Alerting Solution,” which they said they had developed with district officials. The $3.3 million would cover touchscreens, cameras, microphones and speakers, as well as laptops and training for teachers. But the district would only get that price if it made the purchase by the end of the year’s first quarter.

A student works on a typing lesson at Lincoln Elementary in Dolton, Illinois.

Amid heightened concerns about school shootings, the reps also noted the technology would give administrators the ability to communicate with classrooms in a non-disruptive way. They could send all teachers a silent message about a lockdown or other campus emergency.

Member Shalonda Randle said that between the technology project and another $2.4 million proposal for COVID relief funded security upgrades, the district was throwing a lot of information and big price tags at the board — and asking for approval on the spot.

Nohelty countered that the district had vetted the project and invited board members to do some research to learn how “cutting edge” it was. Whitaker implored the board to trust district leaders, saying she didn’t want to be forced to give back the federal money.

Following the board’s approval, Larry Lawrence, its president, did not respond to requests for comment. Randle said it is board policy to refer all media inquiries to Nohelty.

Frank Brandolino, the president of Velocita, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, ViewSonic said the company had engaged teachers and administrators, provided them with clear information through the focus groups, incorporating their feedback into the plan. The project is in the final phase of installation this summer, and staff training, which started in the spring, will continue this fall.

Superintendent says students will use new technology daily

Sanders, the Washington grandmother, says the school’s educators have worked hard to help students bounce back from COVID’s academic and mental health fallout. They’ve tried to build more one-on-one and small group help for struggling students into classes, she said.

She hopes the new technology will allow students who cannot attend for any reason to keep up with schoolwork. Giving students who, say, get diagnosed with COVID a chance to join classmates virtually until they are cleared to return to school sounds like a good thing.

But she wonders how many families will take advantage: Shouldn’t sick kids just stay in bed and rest until they feel better? And she believes the district should be focused on ensuring as many students as possible are in the classroom.

“I think in-person beats virtual any day,” she said.

Gerald Ardito, an education technology expert at Manhattanville College in New York and a former middle school teacher, said the district could be on to an out-of-the-box solution to the student attendance challenges that are still plaguing many districts.

But because this is a novel approach, it’s hard to say whether students who are missing school would actually log on remotely using the new technology.

The district needs to do much more beyond providing that technology, Ardito said. It needs a clear protocol for how and when students join their classrooms virtually and a plan to help them if they run into issues logging in — a significant undertaking to avoid a “chaotic” rollout.

And it needs to provide extensive professional development on effective hybrid and remote teaching beyond merely showing teachers how to use the new screens and software. Teaching online or in a hybrid format is “a profoundly different experience” from teaching in person, he noted.

That’s a heavy lift — and Ardito questions whether having a smaller group of hybrid teachers on each campus would have been more practical than outfitting each classroom and training each teacher.

“We’ve all seen ed tech providers with all the buzzwords about ‘21st century learning’ and ‘global learning communities’,” he said. But, he added, “Technology is just a tool. It doesn’t do anything in and of itself. It’s about how it’s used by teachers, students and parents.”

Darlene McMillian, the teachers union president in Dolton, declined an interview but said in a statement that teachers are excited to learn more about the district’s technology plan.

“While we were provided quite a bit of information during our professional development training in the spring,” she said, “we are looking forward to additional guidance this fall when we actually put the new equipment into practice with our students.”

Based on data reported to the state, Dolton has committed all of its second COVID relief allocation and spent almost a fifth of it as of July, the Illinois State Board of Education said. Though the district has until Sept. 30 to obligate the funding, it has until the end of January to actually spend the money.

In its most recent COVID relief spending plan to the state, Dolton said it would also use the money for expanded after-school programs, some professional development and personal protective equipment, and new Chromebooks for students.

Students in Mr. Kealy’s second grade class use I-Ready to learn math at Lincoln Elementary in Dolton, Illinois.

The state board said that while its officials have reached out to some districts about the slow pace of spending, state officials are confident that all districts are on track to make use of their dollars by the upcoming deadlines. The state credits the federal money with graduation rate improvement, some headway in addressing teacher shortages, and growth on state tests, though proficiency levels remained well below pre-pandemic results last year.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Nohelty said training for staff started this past spring and will continue for years.

He said the shift to permanent hybrid learning he envisioned earlier would be “a little premature” this coming school year; the district would have to secure permission from the state.

But he expects students across the district will be using the new technology daily, logging on from home when they can’t make it to school or from their classrooms when their teacher is absent and a colleague takes on their class from a nearby room.

Nohelty also said he has been hearing from other Illinois superintendents who are potentially interested in replicating what Dolton is doing.

“This technology further enhances and supports the way we deliver our curriculum now,” he said. “We’re unstoppable.”

At Washington Elementary, Sanders says she is eager to find out more about the plan from her school’s principal and teachers. She is giving it the benefit of the doubt — though she feels strongly that parents across the district would oppose any move to require some virtual or hybrid learning.

“It’s bad enough that we put kids through that and messed them up,” she said, adding, “I want to see how this is going to play out.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

COVID aid ends, science of reading, vouchers: 5 things to watch as Indiana’s school year begins

2023-07-25T11:00:00+00:00

The first Indiana school districts head back to school this week amid a spate of new laws and policies that will affect what happens in the classroom.

Recovering from the pandemic’s effects on student performance remains a top priority for schools, as state testing scores indicate that learning has stagnated. But new laws will also expand schools’ focus beyond postsecondary education, and more toward career exploration.

For younger students, Indiana is prioritizing reading instruction through new laws requiring curriculum and teacher training based on the science of reading, an approach to literacy that emphasizes phonics, fluency, and other principles.. Meanwhile, for middle and high schoolers, preparation for postsecondary life is the priority, with new funds earmarked for workforce training.

Public schools are also grappling with the potential impacts of an expanded voucher program, as well as laws aimed at students’ identities and school library books.

Here are five things to watch for as the school year begins.

New standards and approaches to reading

Fresh off the latest statewide testing results showing a decline in students’ reading proficiency, Indiana is continuing a push to make sure schools teach reading through evidence-based practices known as the science of reading. Several new laws and policies will shape how students learn to read this year.

Districts will be evaluating their reading curriculum materials this year to ensure they’re in line with the science of reading practices. They must adopt an approved curriculum by the 2024-25 school year.

Literacy coaches will be coming to schools where fewer than 70% of students passed the state reading assessment, as well as schools that opt in to the Indiana Department of Education’s initiative to place more of these coaches in schools.

Meanwhile, new standards in four core subjects adopted in June will also streamline what students must learn in each grade level. Officials hope this move will allow teachers to focus on the most essential skills in their lessons.

A push toward college and career

While literacy is the emphasis for younger students, middle and high schoolers will see several new initiatives aimed at preparing them for postsecondary training.

All high school seniors will have to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid next spring due to a new law meant to increase Indiana’s college-going rate.

High schoolers will also have access to the state’s new career scholarship accounts, which provide grants for workforce training that they can use outside of traditional high school programs. As part of that new law, students will also attend career fairs throughout the year.

Eligible middle school students, meanwhile, will be automatically enrolled in the 21st Century Scholars program, which covers tuition and fees at an in-state college or university.

A near-universal choice program

Indiana opened its private school voucher program to nearly all students during this year’s legislative session, offering public funding for students to attend private schools and potentially leading to major changes in the state’s enrollment landscape.

It’s not immediately clear how many more students will participate in the program, or whether new participants will primarily be students who are already enrolled in private schools. But declines in enrollment at public schools could create instability in district budgets and affect the students who remain.

The approaching end of ESSER spending

Districts are facing final deadlines to commit the second and third rounds of federal COVID funding — known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER — in September 2023 and September 2024, respectively.

With Indiana no longer allowed to charge families for textbooks and devices, some districts could use federal funds to provide these course materials. Conversely, districts that relied on federal funding for long-term costs like staffing may face a crunch as they figure out how to fold those positions into their budgets.

The state education department’s spending tracker shows that the state has reimbursed schools for around 84% of ESSER II dollars and 46% of ESSER III dollars as of July 17, though these figures don’t represent schools’ expenditures in real time.

The effects of laws aimed at students’ identity

The Indiana legislature this year passed several laws that seek to control how sex and gender are discussed and dealt with in schools.

Among them is a requirement for schools to notify parents if their children request to change their names or pronouns, passed over LGBTQ advocates’ concerns that it could put youth at risk at home. The law also bans sex education lessons in preschool to third grade.

Districts will also grapple with a law that requires them to publish their library catalogs and create procedures for parents and others to request the removal of books. Supporters of the law said it was meant to keep obscene material out of kids’ hands, while librarians said such material isn’t in their libraries to begin with.

If you are having trouble viewing this form, go here.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Wondering about tutoring and if your child would benefit? Here are some answers to your questions.

2023-07-20T18:46:52+00:00

Leer en español.

As educators look for ways to help students as they recover academically from pandemic interruptions, tutoring can play a key role.

But across the country, many leaders are seeing that some of the students who need the help the most aren’t taking advantage.

So, as parents, what questions should you be asking about tutoring and whether your student can benefit? Here are answers to some common questions.

When should I consider tutoring for my child?

Rhonda Haniford, associate commissioner of the school quality and support division at the Colorado Department of Education, said the first thing to keep in mind is that different tutoring programs are designed to achieve different goals.

While parents might think tutoring is only to help students who are struggling academically, sometimes programs are designed instead to keep students engaged, accelerate their learning, or hone in on specific skills or needs.

If a parent believes their child is struggling academically, Haniford said they should look at what their school offers.

“First, I would say meet with the school and talk about what they’re seeing,” Haniford said. “Talk about what’s working, what are the child’s strengths as well as where are their needs. And can tutoring help? It depends on what the tutoring program is designed to accomplish.”

Parent Keri Rodrigues said her five sons’ report cards showed good grades and that her boys were doing well. But when she asked them to read to her at home, she noticed two were struggling.

“These were things I could see,” Rodrigues said.

Rodrigues is co-founder of the advocacy group National Parents Union. She advises parents to trust their instincts and ask questions when they believe their children might be struggling. That means starting with more conversations with teachers.

When talking with teachers, Rodrigues said, one of the most important questions to ask is whether your child is reading at grade level, and if not, what is being done to get them there.

“Report cards often are not telling us this information,” she said.

Ashara Baker, a mother to a rising second grader and also a leader with National Parents Union, advises parents that if their child attends a school that has low state test scores, they should consider tutoring even if it seems like their child is doing well.

What questions should I ask to know if this might be a good tutoring program?

Haniford said the first step is to make sure that the goals of the tutoring program match your child’s needs.

After that, she said, parents should ask if their school has a diagnostic assessment of their child. Most schools do, she said. That information can guide tutors to a student’s needs and to build on their strengths.

Rodrigues likes to remind parents that they don’t need to be well-versed in education curriculum to start asking questions. She suggests asking if a program is using evidence-based practices, which are strategies that are based on research and have been proven to work, and if their reading programs are based on the science of reading, the research about how children’s brains learn to read.

“If you hear things like balanced literacy, that might be a problem,” she said. Balanced Literacy is an approach to teaching reading based on a debunked philosophy that reading is natural and requires encouragement. “Even if you just remember they should say ‘science of reading,’ you shouldn’t be intimidated.”

Some research shows that “high-dosage” tutoring programs may be most effective for students who need academic help. Usually that involves in-person instruction a few times a week.

Baker is leading an effort to get New York schools to make high-dosage tutoring available in public schools.

She said good communication is important. Her local district advertised a summer enrichment program, and her daughter attended. Baker knew her daughter was taken to get a library card and to the farmers market, and she heard about how much fun the kids had with water balloons. But Baker said she didn’t know the program was meant to be a form of tutoring.

“It can be fun, but you have to be checking in: How are we doing? Are we making progress?” Baker said.

She also suggests asking if tutors are trained and certified and finding out how many students are working with each tutor. Small groups are best, she said.

Haniford agrees about small groups. She said the most successful programs have no more than six students per tutor.

“They have a clear purpose and vision for what they want to accomplish, and it’s not a catch-all with too many students, because then students are not getting individualized attention,” Haniford said.

How do I know if my child is getting the most from their tutoring?

Baker suggests that parents make sure the tutoring program their school uses, or that they select from outside groups, does some testing that will measure improvement or where more help is needed.

The tutoring program she pays to help her daughter outside of school now gives parents regular reports about how things are progressing and how parents can help maintain the progress at home.

Jennifer Castillo, new principal of Boston P-8 in Aurora, said that the school has tutoring run by an outside group, but uses the school’s own teachers that are already familiar with their students.

“Having those relationships is very important,” Castillo said. “They know where those student’s gaps are, they know the reasons students are there. I think it’s important for the tutors and the student to be able to go to their parents and show that progress. After a month, I’m seeing an increase in scores or ability or confidence, whatever the issue. As a parent, hopefully you don’t have to ask in a strong partnership.”

Castillo said that if the program you’re considering has tutors who aren’t teachers in the school, parents might ask if there’s a way for the tutors and teachers to communicate with each other so that the tutoring help is aligned with what is happening in the classroom.

Should I wait to get my child into a tutoring program?

“There’s always that tug of should I wait a little longer? Maybe it was a rough year. Maybe it was a rough teacher,” Rodrigues said. “Things don’t get easier the more you wait. They get harder.”

This is especially true for younger children who need extra help to learn to read. Being able to read will help students learn more complex subjects later.

Haniford and Castillo believe parents should clarify why their child needs a break — is there a social or emotional issue, for example — and to look at various options to address the issue.

“Kids don’t need a break from learning,” Castillo said. Learning can happen all day, she added. “But we need to ensure they’re engaged and it’s not just sitting and listening. Taking the tutoring outside, making it more hands-on, or making it more applicable might help.”

Castillo also recommends that students understand the importance of tutoring and the benefits they should see themselves.

“The students have to want to be involved,” Castillo said. “Letting them have some ownership will help as well.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

At least $120 in pandemic food benefits headed to each NYC public school family, officials say

2023-07-20T18:36:20+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

New York City public school families: Hold onto your state-issued food benefits cards. Another allotment of $120 per child is headed your way soon.

The latest disbursement of funds — known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT — aims to help cover summer meal costs for families whose students usually receive free meals at school. Since New York City public schools have universal meals, all families are eligible regardless of household income.

The latest food benefits will roll out later this summer, though state officials didn’t provide a precise timeline. The benefits must be issued by Dec. 31, according to federal guidelines.

The funds follow prior disbursements in recent years, including funds of up to $1,671 per child that began rolling out earlier this year. Those funds were based on COVID-related absences or remote-learning days during the 2021-22 school year, as well as an additional credit for the summer of 2022.

In total, the state has issued $5.4 billion in P-EBT benefits since 2020, with about 60% of benefits issued directly to low-income families who receive federal benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The new summer installment will be the final round of P-EBT benefits for school-age children, state officials said.

In a statement, Justin Mason, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said the agency has conducted “extensive public outreach” and “worked closely with advocacy organizations across the state to ensure all eligible families are aware of these benefits and could take steps to redeem them.”

Advocates have praised the program for providing critical support across New York, especially as the pandemic has placed additional strain on struggling families.

[More: Here’s how NYC families can find free summer meal sites]

In a recent survey, nearly 75% of New York families said it had become harder to afford groceries this past year, according to No Kid Hungry, a national campaign run by the nonprofit Share Our Strength.

“With so many New Yorkers struggling to pay for food, we’re relieved the USDA has approved the State’s plan to provide P-EBT benefits to eligible families,” said Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry NY, in a statement.

For those on a low budget, the USDA estimates a family of four with two school-age children would spend roughly $250 per week on food — or around $1,000 each month.

Who is eligible for P-EBT?

All families with children who attended K-12 in New York City public schools this past school year are eligible for the summer food benefits. Those in charter, private, and other schools who received free meals through the federal school lunch program are also eligible.

Families can receive the benefits regardless of their immigration status.

Do you have to apply for the food benefits?

The benefits will be issued automatically and families do not have to apply for them.

How do you get the benefits?

Families that receive SNAP, state Temporary Assistance, or Medicaid benefits will get their disbursements directly added to those accounts.

All other eligible families will receive the latest round of benefits on the same P-EBT card where they received prior installments.

What if you lost your state-issued P-EBT card?

Those who have lost their P-EBT card can get a replacement by calling 1-888-328-6399.

What can you use P-EBT for?

The benefits can only be used to purchase food items, and are available to families for 274 days after being issued.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

This online tutoring company says it offers expert one-on-one help. Students often get neither.

2023-07-17T11:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Lauren Williams took a job with Paper, one of the biggest virtual tutoring companies used by U.S. schools, because she wanted to help kids.

Williams, a self-described English and history buff who lives just south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, liked the work at first. As she helped students with their writing, it felt like students were getting personal attention they badly needed.

But as Paper ratcheted up the pace and volume of her tutoring assignments last year, Williams grew alarmed.

By this spring, she was routinely working with five students at once on the company’s online platform, which resembles a text-based instant messenger. She found herself toggling between kindergarteners learning to read and high-schoolers writing college essays, frantically trying to respond to each student’s message within Paper’s 50-second time limit.

Her breaking point came as Paper put new pressure on tutors to review essays faster — in part by recycling comments they’d written before.

“I was like: ‘No, I can’t do this,’” said Williams, who quit in March. That kind of help, she concluded, is “not doing what’s right by the kids.”

Lauren Williams

Tapping into the federal government’s historic investment in helping students recover from the pandemic, Paper has won contracts worth tens of millions of dollars telling schools it offers one-on-one tutoring with subject experts.

But the company often fails to deliver that basic service to students, a Chalkbeat investigation has found. In fact, tutors often juggle multiple students at once — a setup other virtual tutoring companies avoid — sometimes in subjects they don’t know well.

Paper argues that a student’s experience is always one-on-one, since students typically aren’t aware their tutor is working with others.

But the company’s practices and internal messaging suggest top officials know multi-tasking can be a challenge for tutors. It has even paid tutors “surge” bonuses of two to three times their normal pay rate for every minute they work with four or more students at once.

“At least when you’re in that stressful experience of having four kids in your classroom you know that you’re making double pay,” said Julia Drury, Paper’s senior director of operations, at a virtual company meeting last summer. “If you’re doing the work of two tutors, then you should be paid for the work of two tutors.”

School districts and state education agencies, meanwhile, are investing millions of COVID relief dollars in Paper’s services, sometimes none the wiser.

To report this story, Chalkbeat interviewed more than a dozen current and former Paper employees and reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, including screenshots of internal conversations among employees.

In an interview, Paper’s CEO, Philip Cutler, did not dispute Chalkbeat’s findings that tutors are often working with more than one student at a time and that tutors sometimes work with students on unfamiliar subjects.

But he maintains that Paper is delivering one-on-one tutoring because tutors who work with multiple students do so in separate, individual sessions.

“The student’s experience is one-on-one,” Cutler told Chalkbeat in June. “The tutor can be supporting multiple people. The idea is that the attention I’m getting is dedicated to me.”

Several school officials said they were not aware that Paper tutors were often working with multiple students at once until Chalkbeat told them.

“The department will follow up with Paper about this and continue to monitor, throughout the upcoming school year, if this practice has any impact on student engagement and/or satisfaction of services,” wrote Jean Cook, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Education, one of Paper’s largest clients, in an email to Chalkbeat.

Paper tutors juggle multiple students at once

As students fell behind during the pandemic, many researchers and education officials encouraged schools to tutor their students. That recommendation was backed by years of research that has found tutoring can deliver positive academic results, especially when kids get one-on-one help.

Amid staffing shortages, many school districts struggled to find and hire in-person tutors. That’s why many schools were drawn to Paper, which relies on 2,000 mostly part-time tutors who typically log on virtually from their homes across the U.S. and Canada.

Today the nine-year-old, Montreal-based company holds contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to tutor more than three million students in 600 districts across the U.S. and Canada. Much of that is backed by federal COVID relief money.

Chalkbeat previously found that Paper’s tutoring often goes unused, particularly by students who most need help. The company lost a contract earlier this year with the state of New Mexico, after officials there said Paper had failed to meet students’ needs.

Paper has told potential clients, like New Mexico, that it provides “a 1:1 student-tutor ratio.”

“We tailor instruction for each student,” Paper wrote to New Mexico education officials last fall in a proposal to work with the state. “With our 1:1 support, your students will receive the personalized attention they need.”

Paper issued this guidance to tutors to help them manage multiple students at once.

But Paper tutors often can’t do that, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Paper tutors. The company’s employee handbook tells tutors they should be able to work comfortably with three students at once.

“We’ve found this to usually be manageable without sacrificing quality,” the handbook states. It adds: “there is no maximum number of students a tutor can be matched with simultaneously.”

Paper offers tipsheets for tutors meant to help them work with multiple students at once. One guide obtained by Chalkbeat tells tutors to ask students questions about what they want to work on to “buy you some buffer time to navigate between students.” Tutors can also “LET STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD!” to make it “easier” to toggle between sessions.

Cutler said it’s rare for tutors to work with more than three students at once and that it only happens for short bursts of times, or “surges.”

Paper’s own data, provided to Chalkbeat by the company, shows that tutors spent 33% of their working hours over the last school year helping two students at once, 10% of their time helping three students at once, and just under 2% of their time helping four or more students. The rest of the time, tutors worked with one or no students.

But several tutors said those rates don’t accurately reflect their workload, which spikes in the mornings and afternoons. Internally, Paper has acknowledged that tutors who work in high-demand subjects like math experience surges of four or more students “on kind of an ongoing basis,” as Drury said at the virtual company meeting last summer.

One math and science tutor told Chalkbeat he’d helped a dozen students at once. Another math and science tutor said she’d gotten 10 students during a surge.

“You just keep switching tabs,” the tutor said. “I feel bad for some of these kids who are using the platform.”

Paper has resisted making changes that could cut down on tutor multitasking, such as adding a waiting room or scheduling option, because they could result in fewer students using Paper, according to a former manager who left Paper last year after several years with the company.

“The response to it was just like: ‘We don’t want to turn students away,’” said the former manager, who asked not to be named because they signed a confidentiality agreement with Paper that prohibits sharing details about the company’s internal operations. “The quality of the service was always secondary.”

Cutler said “that’s certainly not the case” and that Paper has been “very focused on delivering a high level of quality over cost.”

This kind of juggling is not the industry standard. Many other virtual tutoring companies offer intentional group sessions where students work together on similar assignments. Others conduct tutoring sessions over live audio or live video, which makes toggling between students nearly impossible. Paper does neither.

And other companies that offer text-based tutoring limit the number of students a tutor has at once.

TutorMe, for example, said its platform allows tutors to conduct only one session at a time. Varsity Tutors said when a student requests an on-demand tutor, a tutor can’t get another student “until the session is resolved.” Tutor.com said the maximum number of students a tutor can have at once is two, and that happens in only 2% of sessions.

“We NEVER work with multiple students in DIFFERENT individual sessions at the same time,” Mike Cohen, the CEO of Cignition, a California-based company that contracts with the Denver, Los Angeles, and Baltimore school districts, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.

Figuring out how to run a tutoring program that delivers quality help to a significant number of students without breaking the bank remains a huge challenge for schools, especially as COVID relief funds dwindle. One of Paper’s biggest selling points is that districts can offer unlimited virtual tutoring to all their students at a fixed price. If lots of students use it, it can be less expensive than pricey in-person tutoring programs.

Experts say they understand how those competing needs drove some districts to select on-demand homework help, like the kind Paper offers, even though it does not have many of the hallmarks of effective tutoring.

“It’s easy to implement,” said Jennifer Krajewski, who helps schools choose evidence-based tutoring programs through a Johns Hopkins University initiative called ProvenTutoring. “And it doesn’t necessarily require shifts in schedules. Those are real challenges that schools are facing.”

But when districts express interest in virtual, on-demand tutoring, Krajewski said she cautions school leaders to ask about how many students tutors will work with at once, and what kind of relationship students will build with tutors. Several companies, including Paper, match students with a new virtual tutor every time they log on.

“A big part of why tutoring is so powerful is that human connection with somebody who cares about you,” said Amanda Neitzel, a Johns Hopkins assistant research scientist who works with schools through ProvenTutoring. “If you are doing a virtual model with somebody who is juggling two other kids, even in the best-case scenario, how much are you actually doing that?”

Some schools left in dark about Paper’s tutoring practices

Tutors have repeatedly told Paper that they worry the company’s advertising is misleading schools, internal records and interviews show. In March, one tutor asked on Slack, the company’s internal messaging platform, if Paper would stop saying it offers one-on-one tutoring on its website because “it has not been that way, according to many tutors.” A top manager defended the description.

“You are working with a student in an individual session!” Caroline Schwim, Paper’s senior manager of teaching and learning, wrote in response. “We are open with our districts about tutors working with multiple sessions which helps us remain affordable for them!”

Cutler says school districts are informed that tutors may be working with multiple students at once “through the sales process” and that “districts are fine with that.”

But the Mississippi Department of Education, which is paying Paper $10.7 million to tutor up to 350,000 students across the state, told Chalkbeat it did not know. A state official there said the department would talk with Paper about this practice and monitor whether it was affecting student engagement or satisfaction with tutoring.

Clarissa Trejo, a spokesperson for Fontana Unified schools in California, said the district “has never had a conversation regarding how many students a tutor would be helping at a time.” The district, which has paid Paper $1.9 million to tutor some 38,000 students, had no concerns about the quality of Paper’s tutoring, Trejo added.

Meanwhile, officials with Arlington Public Schools in Virginia and Los Angeles Unified told Chalkbeat they didn’t learn that tutors may help multiple students at once until after they had agreed to work with Paper and were putting the program in place. Still, a Los Angeles schools spokesperson said Paper is “an essential component” of the district’s plan for giving students “individualized instruction.”

Other school officials said they were aware before they hired Paper. Clark County schools in Nevada, which is paying Paper nearly $13 million to tutor 302,000 students, said the district found out in its initial conversations with Paper that tutors “may conduct simultaneous one-on-one learning sessions with multiple students.”

The Tennessee Department of Education, which has a contract with Paper worth up to $1.3 million, said its contract permits Paper tutors to work with up to three students at a time — a limit that doesn’t typically appear in other Paper contracts.

“We have received no complaints or evidence that Paper is violating their contract,” wrote Brian Blackley, a spokesperson for the state, in an email.

Paper tells tutors to Google their way through sessions

When students log on to Paper’s platform, they expect to be matched with a tutor who knows something about the subject they need help with. Paper says it employs “experts across K-12 subject areas” on its website, and that it gives tutors aptitude tests to vet their knowledge.

But in practice, several current Paper tutors said they are routinely matched with students who need help with subjects they don’t know. Tutors who feel stuck can transfer a student to a colleague with more expertise, but they can be fired if they do that too often.

Paper advises tutors to consult Google for help when they are paired with a student in a subject they don’t know well.

Paper has told uncertain tutors to buy time by asking the student a question while they essentially Google their way through the session.

“Even if you’re uncertain, give it a go,” Schwim told tutors last fall during a video training, according to a screenshot viewed by Chalkbeat.

The result looks something like what happened to Shannon Dickinson’s daughter, a high school junior in Las Vegas. Dickinson, a kindergarten teacher, had heard Clark County schools was offering tutoring through Paper, and she urged her daughter to give it a try when she was struggling with her pre-calculus class in January.

But each time the 11th grader logged on and showed a Paper tutor her math problem, she waited for a long time only to find out the tutor couldn’t help.

“It would be like 45 minutes later: ‘Sorry I can’t help you, I’m going to transfer you to someone else,’” Dickinson recalled. “Then she’d have to do the process again.” After several failed attempts to get help, Dickinson’s daughter told her: “This is not worth my time.”

When Chalkbeat told Dickinson that Paper’s tutors are told to Google their way through sessions when they’re stuck, she was stunned.

“Oh geez,” she replied. “Well, high schoolers can do that too!”

Wendi Dunlap, who worked for Paper for just over a year before she quit in March, has seen this play out from the tutor’s side. Earlier this year, Dunlap, an English and history tutor, got paired with a middle schooler with a math question. Dunlap tried to help anyway, following the company’s protocols. But when the student checked the work they’d done against an answer key, she reported back: “That’s completely wrong.”

Dunlap apologized and scrambled to transfer the student to a math tutor, but it was too late. The student had signed off.

“I felt so horrible,” Dunlap said. “It wasn’t fair to her.”

A math and economics tutor who’s been with Paper for four years said she once spent 45 minutes trying to convince her manager over Slack that she needed to transfer a high school student with a chemistry question that she had “zero clue” how to solve. To stall for time, she asked the student for their notes. Essentially, though, the student spent that time “doing nothing,” the tutor said.

“It’s just leading to the student getting more frustrated,” the tutor said. “This is not right.”

Cutler said scenarios like those are uncommon. The guidance Paper has given to tutors, he added, is similar to what teachers are expected to do if a student asks a question the teacher doesn’t know how to answer.

“I don’t dismiss the student, I say: ‘Let’s figure it out,’” Cutler said. “‘Let’s pull up the internet.’”

Paper advertises that it offers one-on-one virtual tutoring with subject experts on its website.

Paper also puts pressure on tutors to work quickly. Tutors are expected to respond to students within 50 seconds, internal records show, regardless of how many students they have at once or how complicated the student’s question is. Tutors who review essays are told to spend no more than 30 minutes per assignment, no matter how long it is. To do that, several tutors said they copy and paste pre-written feedback.

When tutors miss those targets, managers tell them to speed up. Tutors have been fired for failing to meet their marks, internal records show.

Internally, Paper officials have justified the time limits by saying they allow the company to charge less “so that even underfunded districts (those who need us the most!) can afford us,” Schwim wrote to employees in March, according to a screenshot viewed by Chalkbeat. The company has marketed its tutoring as a way to address inequities among students, “especially those from marginalized groups.”

Several tutors said the breakneck pace makes it harder to help students. One tutor, who left the company in January, said they got a urinary tract infection from skipping bathroom breaks as they tried to keep up with students. Two other tutors said they carried their laptops into the bathroom so they could keep working on the toilet.

“You couldn’t take your hands off the keyboard,” said the tutor who got the UTI, who asked not to be identified because they signed a non-disparagement agreement with Paper, a copy of which Chalkbeat viewed.

Cutler said tutors have told Paper that they take their computers into the bathroom to keep working, but that the company doesn’t “encourage” this practice. Paper recently instituted a “chime” to remind tutors to take their break, he added.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Dickinson figured out a way to get her daughter the math help she needed.

She dipped into her own pocket to pay for private tutoring.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Denver expanded summer school with COVID relief dollars. Are students making academic gains?

2023-07-07T21:39:17+00:00

There are three pies and four monsters. How much pie will each monster eat?

That was the math question before five soon-to-be fifth graders earlier this week at Summer Connections, Denver Public Schools’ full-day summer program for elementary students.

With dry erase markers and personal white boards, the students sat in a loose semicircle on the floor of a classroom at Joe Shoemaker elementary school, puzzling out the answer. A student named Gael was the first to solve it.

“Gael says three-quarters,” the teacher said. “Why, Gael?”

Smaller class sizes, a mix of academics and fun, and acceleration instead of remediation — meaning incoming fifth graders do fifth grade work instead of reviewing fourth grade skills — are the hallmarks of Summer Connections, which is now in its second year and serving about 1,860 elementary school students.

But it’s hard to understand whether the program, which is funded by federal COVID relief dollars and meant to help students catch up on lost learning, is having the intended effect.

Initial data comparing the spring and fall reading scores of first through third graders who had attended Summer Connections last year showed they did not experience “summer slide,” or the loss of academic skills. That was good news, given that the same data showed that students who did not attend Summer Connections did experience summer slide in reading.

But a more detailed analysis showed no difference in reading scores between the two groups. That analysis, which matched Summer Connections students with non-Summer Connections students who were similar demographically and academically, found the two groups “had statistically identical average fall test scores,” according to a district memo.

A pre-pandemic half-day summer program called Summer Academy had the same outcome.

In an interview, Angelin Thompson, the director of extended academic learning for DPS, pointed out that the more detailed analysis was also narrower. It only looked at students who took one particular reading test, Istation English, which was about half of Summer Connections students.

DPS researchers highlighted other caveats too, including that comparing Summer Connections students to non-Summer Connections students is imperfect. Unlike in medical studies where one group is given a placebo and the other is given a drug, there is no placebo in this comparison. The students who did not attend Summer Connections could have spent their summer playing and never picking up a book or with a private reading tutor.

And while Summer Connections focused on math and science in addition to reading, there were no fall tests in the other subjects to measure whether students made progress.

For her part, Thompson is focusing on the broader analysis that showed Summer Connections students didn’t experience summer slide. It could be a key piece of data as DPS leaders decide whether to keep the program, which is costing nearly $4 million to run this summer, when the federal stimulus dollars, known as ESSER, dry up next year.

“I’m hoping we will make the case that this program is so beneficial and families appreciate it and kids are having fun,” Thompson said. “Once the ESSER dollars go away, DPS will have to make hard choices on what we continue to fund and what we don’t.”

Some said the day was too long, while others asked for more

Summer Connections debuted last summer as a super-size version of the half-day Summer Academy. Summer Connections was almost twice as long at six weeks instead of 3½ weeks. It offered a full day of academics instead of a half day, and it was open to all elementary students, not just those struggling with reading or learning English.

This year’s program is similar, with a few tweaks based on lessons learned. Summer Connections is five weeks this year instead of six, a compromise between parents and teachers who said six weeks was too long and research that says longer is better, Thompson said.

It’s still a full day, though, despite some concern from teachers. In a survey of last year’s Summer Connections teachers, 54% who said they wouldn’t return this summer cited “day too long” as the reason. “The full days were extremely long,” one wrote, according to a district slide presentation summarizing the survey results.

“Kids were having a rough time and often didn’t attend much,” another wrote.

Parents were split on the issue, with some asking in the survey for a half-day option and others asking for more coverage, including child care in the mornings before 9 a.m.

One parent wrote that the hours were “very working parent friendly.”

Thompson, who is newly in charge of the program this year, said DPS kept the full day because parents and students wanted it, and to fit in all the fun activities, including gym and computer science classes, Lego challenges, and a new field trip to the Denver Aquarium. To address teachers’ concerns, Summer Connections added more student-free time during the day for teachers to prep their lessons.

Thompson also hired more special education teachers and paraprofessionals to address another issue: a perceived lack of support for students with disabilities last summer. Some teachers said they didn’t know until the first day of the program which students had special education plans, and some parents said teachers didn’t follow their children’s plans.

Special education has been tricky. Students with disabilities are overrepresented at Summer Connections, but the program is not specifically designed for them.

Last year, 22% of the roughly 2,000 Summer Connections students had a special education plan, which is twice the district rate. Some students with disabilities are offered a different summer program called “extended school year,” which is tailored to their needs. But it’s only a half-day program, and Thompson said some families opted for the full-day Summer Connections instead, despite attempts to explain that the other program has more resources.

“At Summer Connections, we don’t turn away anyone for any reason,” Thompson said. “If you register your kid when there’s available space, that’s it.”

This year, only one of the 10 schools hosting Summer Connections — Lowry Elementary — had a wait list. At all of the other schools, all students who wanted to attend got in.

Friendships and social growth were a bright spot

Even if the academic results from last year’s Summer Connections program were complicated, the survey results revealed another bright spot: fun and friendships.

Almost all of the students surveyed said they made friends, and 31% said it was their favorite part of the program. (The first runner-up? Recess.)

“That I made new friends and I also learned how to multiply two digits and one digits together,” one student wrote in response to what they liked about Summer Connections.

Teachers also cited students’ social growth as a success of the program, and 96% of parents said it helped their child be more socially prepared for the next school year.

“I think it has been a very interesting social experience for students,” one teacher wrote. “Very few students knew each other beforehand so it was amazing to see how they created friendships in such a short amount of time. I hope that stays with our students and empowers them to create friendships wherever they go in life.”

That social success was evident on the playground during recess at Joe Shoemaker elementary school this week. A clump of fifth grade girls wandered the soccer field chatting while third graders chased each other up the climbing mountain and across plastic toadstools.

A big group of boys played a fast-paced game of basketball as a recess monitor shouted, “Pass it! Shoot it! Yes, that’s it!” Girls dangled off the rope jungle gym, their hair floating free.

Not a single student sat alone.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago school board approves $9.4 billion budget as district officials warn of looming deficit

2023-06-28T22:05:00+00:00

The Chicago Board of Education approved a flat $9.4 billion spending plan for the next school year on Wednesday — and warned of looming deficits as federal COVID money runs out.

The 2024 budget is a fraction of a percent larger than last year’s, and allocates roughly half — or $4.8 billion — directly to schools. Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned on moving school funding away from being based on enrollment, a shift officials say is underway.

But the overall budget could grow later this year after the district does a comprehensive facilities review and puts forward a supplemental capital budget. On Wednesday, the school board approved a smaller $155 million capital plan. It did not include a hotly contested proposal to build a $120 million new high school on the Near South Side, though money for that project was included in the state’s 2024 budget signed earlier this month.

District officials and school board members said Wednesday they hope the state will provide Chicago Public Schools with additional funding in the future to avoid a fiscal cliff when COVID recovery money runs out next year.

“Many districts around the country right now are pressured to cut,” said Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. “We’re seeing layoffs. We’re seeing school closures. And so it is, it is a warning for us.”

Chicago Public Schools used much of its COVID recovery money to pay for existing and additional staff, such as academic interventionists and social workers. The district also boosted summer school programs and went on a technology spending spree.

Most schools will see flat or increased budgets under the approved 2024 budget. But a Chalkbeat analysis of school-level budget data released earlier this month shows that on a per pupil basis, 39 schools, or about 8% of campuses, will see budget cuts. Of those schools, 24 were predominantly Black, eight were majority Latino, and three were predominantly white. But schools serving predominantly Black students also saw the most substantial per pupil increases overall.

The district is forecasting a deficit of roughly $628 million by 2026. Next year, the district will spend the last of its $2.8 billion in federal COVID money, leaving it no financial cushion against declining student enrollment and rising pension and debt costs. Roughly 80,000 fewer students are enrolled in Chicago schools than there were a decade ago. The district has not released enrollment projections for next year.

School board president Miguel del Valle, who also announced Wednesday he would be stepping down as his term ends this month, said the district was facing a structural deficit during his first budget in 2019.

“If it hadn’t been for the federal dollars, that began to arrive … we’d be in even worse shape than we are,” Del Valle said. He noted that roughly a quarter of the district’s state funding goes toward paying down debt for both teacher pensions and past school construction. “Those two combined have us in a bind.”

The nonpartisan budget watchdog Civic Federation raised concerns about the “long-term viability” of Chicago Public Schools budget. The group’s annual analysis said it’s imperative the district work with the City of Chicago on a long-term financial plan that addresses several of the “financial entanglements” between the two before the school boards begins its shift to being elected, rather than appointed by the mayor.

Voters will elect 10 members in 2024, while the mayor will appoint 10 and a school board president. The 11 appointed seats will be elected in 2026 and by 2027, all 21 members will have been elected.

“Now is a critical time for Chicago Public Schools to plan for its financial future,” the watchdog group wrote.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school board approves 2023-24 budget that cuts over 300 jobs

2023-06-14T03:08:49+00:00

The Detroit school board approved a $1.138 billion budget for the coming academic year that cuts spending by roughly $300 million from last year, accounting for a pandemic-fueled enrollment decline and the depletion of federal COVID relief aid.

Tuesday’s 6-1 vote came amid dissent from district staff, parents, and community members over the budget cuts, and concludes a monthslong public discourse over the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s proposal to eliminate over 300 positions to help stabilize its finances. The cuts largely affect central office administrators, but also target school-based employees such as deans, assistant principals, college transition advisers, school culture facilitators, and kindergarten paraeducators.

“What you see before us today, is the best thinking on the very tough decision that we’re in with the loss in enrollment,” said board President Angelique Peterson-Mayberry.

The lone no vote came from board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo.

“To say that we’ve balanced the budget … but have we balanced true academic achievement? I’m not so sure that this budget does that,” Gay-Dagnogo said ahead of the vote.

The budget is expected to cut roughly $36 million in recurring salary and benefit costs, according to a budget presentation.

Vitti says fewer than 25 employees face layoff

DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti was talking with school board members about the budget cuts at least as far back as February, making it clear that the district would have to make hard decisions because of the lack of federal COVID relief aid, a decline in student enrollment, and increases in employee salaries, health care costs, and inflation. In some cases, the district scaled back its initially proposed cuts, for example, sparing school attendance agents.

In early May, Vitti received approval from the school board to send layoff notices to all targeted employees.

The cutbacks have drawn sharp criticism from affected staff as well as students, parents, and community members concerned about the potential short- and long-term effects on students and other educators.

On Tuesday, Vitti said that without a more equitable formula for state school funding, DPSCD will have to consider tough tradeoffs year after year.

Michigan’s system allocates school funding on a per-pupil basis, but still allows for disparities in spending between poorer and wealthier districts. Recent studies have called for changing the system to address those disparities and better account for the needs of students, and the Michigan Legislature is considering measures that would help bridge the gap.

“We are not equally and equitably funded to provide everything that our children deserve, but I do think the board and I try to do the best with the resources we have,” said Vitti.

“This is not a new problem. This is a decades-long problem,” he added. “I hope all the energy that is directed toward me and the board is also directed toward the governor and the Legislature.”

Under the district’s budget proposal, two-thirds of the affected staff members had the chance to apply for other district jobs, at equal or similar wages. Vitti estimated that fewer than 25 employees could face a layoff by the end of the month if they don’t accept the district’s offer. The majority of targeted employees had their positions funded by their individual school, moved to another district job, resigned, or accepted a severance package, he added.

“By the time we get to the end of June, there may be five people that have not actively taken a severance or selected another position,” Vitti said, noting that DPSCD officials had negotiated with the district’s teachers union for a specific severance amount.

But some public commenters on Tuesday pushed back against his explanation.

“Many have accepted the positions, but it is by force and not by choice,” said Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

“My fear tonight is that in August, when our children return, schools will be so understaffed, we will see our schoolchildren, our parents, our teachers, counselors, and many other positions and possibly stakeholders make choices with their feet to leave.”

Han Langsdorf, a day-to-day substitute teacher for the district, noted that one of the positions offered to support staff whose jobs were cut was day-to-day sub, which does not provide benefits.

“These layoffs did not need to happen,” said Langsdorf, who was sitting with a small group of DFT members near the front of the auditorium. “They caused a lot of stress, and educators do not get the respect they deserve.”

Han Langsdorf, a substitute teacher in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, speaks against proposed budget cuts at a school board meeting on June 13, 2023.

Marcus Walton, a DFT executive board member and teacher at the Jerry L. White Center, a high school for students with disabilities, said the support staff targeted in the budget cuts are the people students need the most.

“You elected officials, you’re going to value our children as much as we value them,” he said. “That’s why I stayed here after 30 years, because I care about the students. So, am I tired? Hell yeah, but I’m not going to give up.”

District faces rising costs as COVID aid runs out

Employee salaries and utilities costs are expected to rise by 5% next year, according to the district’s budget projections. Individual schools will continue to have after-school math and literacy tutoring, mental health support, field trips, and school-based intervention. But the district will no longer allocate funding toward expanded summer school and a nurse in every school building.

DPSCD has already spent or allocated the $1.27 billion in COVID funding it received to help students recover from the pandemic, with about $700 million earmarked for a multiyear plan to rebuild, renovate and phase out school buildings across the city.

The end of that funding stream will hit the district hard, because one of its main remaining sources of revenue is state aid based on enrollment. The district currently has about 48,000 students, down from 50,400 students before the pandemic. That decline of roughly 2,000 students equates to roughly $20 million in lost enrollment-based funding.

DPSCD officials, however, are anticipating a windfall from Lansing. School aid budgets under discussion in the Legislature would provide the district with an increase in per-pupil funding of more than $450, and a separate appropriation of $94.4 million to settle a 2016 “right to read” lawsuit against the state.

Vitti said those dollars could help the district bring back some of its COVID-funded initiatives, and place security guards at smaller schools.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Micah Walker is a reporter for BridgeDetroit, where she covers arts, culture, and education. Contact Micah at mwalker@bridgedetroit.com.

Detroit families will have fewer summer school options this year as district scales back programs

2023-06-08T22:13:45+00:00

Detroit parent Cazar Baird likes her kids to have something to do during the summer. In the past, she searched for dance programs or church-sponsored basketball clinics to keep her three children busy.

When she found out last year that the Detroit school district was offering expanded summer programming at her youngest son’s school, she quickly took advantage.

It has been the best way to “keep him sharp and active” over the summer months, Baird said. And unlike other summer camps around the city, it has been free.

But as her son neared the end of third grade at Gompers Elementary-Middle School this week, Baird was still figuring out where to send him this summer.

That’s because the Detroit Public Schools Community District no longer plans to have the robust summer learning programs it offered to district families over the past two years, using COVID relief aid from the federal government. It’s pivoting back to a narrower range of offerings: course recovery for missed or failed classes to students in grades 8-12, a transition program for incoming kindergarteners, and some limited activities in partnership with local recreation centers and public libraries.

DPSCD was among the many Michigan school districts that used COVID relief aid to beef up their summer programming, offering anything from credit recovery to camps focused on robotics, sports, and culinary arts. The expanded options came at the right time for students struggling with the academic impact of the pandemic and parents struggling with child care. Many parents and students have been looking for extra study time, fun activities, and opportunities to make up credits.

DPSCD spent a combined $21 million on programs over the past two summers, and its Summer Learning Experiences program was spotlighted by the White House in a tour by U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and first lady Jill Biden of summer school programs funded by COVID relief aid.

But by the end of this school year, DPSCD will have spent or allocated the $1.27 billion it received in COVID funding, and Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said it would be tough to justify continued investment in expanded summer school.

The summer programs helped keep some students engaged, he said, but they were not nearly as successful as officials hoped.

“There isn’t concrete evidence that summer school leads to raising student achievement in the aggregate, because many students do not attend summer school,” Vitti told families and community members at a virtual community meeting Monday.

When the district had COVID relief money to spend, Vitti said, more than 40,000 K-8 students were eligible to attend. But only 900 signed up, and barely a third of them actually attended.

“And summer school is only for four to five weeks,” he said. “So you really can’t make up a whole year over the summer. It’s great to offer it, but it’s not directly linked to student achievement as a district.”

That’s not to say the money was a waste. The summer programming “allowed families and students to overcome their fears of returning to school in person,” Vitti said, and “provided families and students with a safe and reliable child care option during the summer.”

That’s something Baird appreciated about the district’s summer programming.

“Some parents can’t afford a lot of these summer camp programs, because they have more than one child to provide for,” she said.

“Most of these programs are weekly or biweekly, but it’s still per child, and like $200 or $240, or $180, and that’s a lot of money.”

Other districts are continuing with their extensive summer learning plans, using what’s left of the money they received under the federal aid programs, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER.

Ypsilanti Community Schools has already registered 1,280 students — about a third of its total enrollment — for its Grizzly Learning Camp, according to district spokesperson Leslie Davis. The district is spending about $1.5 million on summer school, using ESSER dollars and state funds. The program offers a mix of robotics and sports instruction, as well as credit recovery classes for students who need them.

Southfield Public Schools has spent roughly $465,000 in COVID relief money between last year and this year to bolster its summer programming, emphasizing math and literacy instruction for students who have fallen behind, and providing field trips as well as electives in STEM, yoga, and physical education.

In Detroit, the scaling back of summer school comes amid discussions about broader budget cuts the district wants to make to account for the depletion of federal COVID aid and declining enrollment.

Vitti said DPSCD would need roughly $8 million to continue offering the same academic and extracurricular summer programs to K-8 students that it provided through Summer Learning Experiences.

Some relief could come from Lansing, where the Legislature is getting set to take up a school aid budget that may provide another infusion of money for DPSCD. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s school aid budget proposal recommends appropriating $94.4 million to the district to settle a 2016 “right to read” lawsuit against the state.

While the settlement money is strictly limited to supporting the district’s literacy plan, Vitti said, the extra funding would allow the district to reallocate other dollars toward bringing back other ESSER-funded initiatives such as expanding after school and summer programming, and placing contracted nurses in every school.

In the meantime, DPSCD is still looking to provide some summer programming for its families. The district’s Office of Family and Community Engagement is partnering with the Detroit Public Library to offer summer reading activities from July 10 to Aug. 4, with limited registration.

DPSCD is also expanding its Kindergarten Boot Camp, a four-week program designed to help students and families transition from preschool to kindergarten. The two sessions will operate from June 20 through July 14, and July 10 through Aug. 4.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s Summer Rising program rejected 45,000 applicants, launching scramble for child care

2023-05-24T21:50:38+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

Roughly 45,000 children have been shut out of New York City’s free, popular summer program, education department officials said this week.

The program, which runs between six to seven weeks for most students, provides academics during the morning and enrichment activities in the afternoon for children in grades K-8 across the five boroughs from July to August.

Like last year, a total of 110,000 seats were available this year, with a portion held open for students mandated to attend summer school. During a City Council hearing this week, the education department’s Chief Operating Officer Emma Vadehra said there are 94,000 seats available for 139,000 applicants. Officials initially reported that 30,000 families did not receive spots.

It’s possible that some of the rejected applicants will have to attend the program anyway for academic reasons and will get a seat that has been set aside. Still, many of those families, who were notified earlier this month that they didn’t get seats, are likely scrambling to find summer programs for their children before the school year ends on June 27.

“The basic challenge is that demand outstripped supply pretty dramatically,” Vadehra told City Council members. “And so there’s different ways that could have looked, but we just didn’t have enough seats in the program for the number of kids and families that really wanted this program despite the fact that it is the largest summer program we’ve had – and the largest in the country.”

Two of those unsuccessful applicants were Alejandra Perez’s 5- and 10-year-old sons, who should have been prioritized for seats because they attend an after-school program run by the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, through a community-based organization that helps oversee Summer Rising.

Perez, a lifelong East Harlemite, paid $2,250 last summer for six weeks of child care, which she can barely afford again this year.

But in mid-May, about three weeks after applying, she was informed via email that her sons, who attend a charter school in East Harlem, didn’t get in. While she can probably rely on a relative to care for her older son, she is scrambling to find free or affordable care for her 5-year-old.

“I am still trying to find a program,” she said. “By the act of God, maybe I’ll get an email like, ‘Hey, we found you a spot!’”

Some children with priority did not get spots

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio established the program two years ago with federal relief dollars as the city clawed its way out of the pandemic, attempting to provide children with a bridge back to school after remote learning. It differs from summer programs in the past: It’s open to any child, including those in charters and private school, not just those who are mandated to attend summer school.

The program, though bumpy with its initial roll out, has grown in popularity. This year, city officials made a couple of key changes to the application process. While still open to the same number of children, applicants were allowed to rank choices for Summer Rising sites instead of the first come, first served process last year. Additionally, students who attend after-school programs subsidized through the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, or DYCD, were supposed to be prioritized for seats, like Perez’s children. That’s in addition to students living in temporary housing, children in foster care, and children with disabilities who must have services year round.

Perez had ranked three Summer Rising sites close to her home. Perez said the application did not ask if her kids were in an after-school program. According to an education department spokesperson, Perez’s children didn’t receive a spot because there was likely a lot of demand at the sites she chose.

When she asked someone from the after-school program why her sons didn’t get into Summer Rising, they didn’t have an answer — except that none of the kids in the program who applied got in, Perez said. (A representative for their SCAN-Harbor Beacon after-school program did not return a request for comment.)

During the City Council hearing this week, officials said that just over half of the seats that have been filled went to students in the priority groups. Of those, 29,000 spots went to students who were in DYCD-run after-school programs, 16,000 went to students in temporary housing, 3,000 seats to children with 12-month individualized education programs, or IEPs, and another 1,000 to students in foster care. (Last year, Summer Rising had 12,000 students in temporary housing, 2,700 students with 12-month IEPs and 1,000 students in foster care.)

New seats won’t be added, but filled seats might open up

Vadehra said they’re not planning to add seats — emphasizing that this program is being supported by federal dollars that are set to run out next year — and there is no wait list for seats. But they are expecting an unspecified number of spots to open up, either because fewer students will be mandated to attend summer school or because families may decline a seat they’ve been offered. The education department is working with DYCD to figure out how to make families aware of empty seats in June and how they can apply for those, she said.

In the meantime, parents are scrambling to find options that seem few and far between — and too pricey.

Perez’s rejection email from the education department included a link to other DYCD programs that might be available. She said she has called every local community-based organization near her home for some type of programming with no luck.

“At this point I am just emailing everyone,” she said.

Tia Jackson, who lives in Central Harlem, knew she would potentially need to scramble for summer options if her son didn’t get into Summer Rising, so she signed him up for a YMCA program near her home. Her planning came in handy: Her son did not get a Summer Rising seat.

While he doesn’t fall into any of the priority groups, her son, who is autistic, also has an individualized education program. The YMCA program has staff who can assist him if he needs extra support, Jackson said. She will be reimbursed up to $2,250 for summer care expenses through the state’s Office of People With Developmental Disabilities, but that only ensures four weeks of summer programming for her son. He’s planning to visit his aunt in Florida for one week, and she will pay out of pocket for child care for an additional week.

She feels thankful for having a “Plan A and Plan B.”

“I feel like the way they rolled out the program to start was very late, and it wasn’t the best for working parents, typically because when you think about summer camps most applications for summer camp start in February and March,” she said. “We didn’t get the Summer Rising notification until April.”

The department spokesperson did not explain the timing of the Summer Rising application, except to say there are several factors that impact the timeline.

Both of Loretta Bencivengo’s children got into Summer Rising last year, likely because she submitted her application as soon as it opened during the previous first come, first served model. This year they didn’t get spots, said Bencivengo, who lives in Windsor Terrace.

The most affordable alternate option she’s found so far is with the local YMCA for a $5,000, eight-week program for both of her children, which she equated to two months of rent. Many places don’t have space this late in the spring, she said.

“All those slots are filled up in January and February,” she said of private programs. “If that’s the case, why not put this application out in November and December so that you can open an appropriate amount of slots?”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC won’t slash school budgets at first, but mid-year cuts are still possible

2023-05-22T22:33:01+00:00

New York City schools won’t have to brace for budget cuts next school year — at least at first.

All schools will receive the same amount of money or more at the start of the 2023-24 academic year as they did this year despite some of the “fiscal challenges” facing the city, Chancellor David Banks announced on Monday during a City Council hearing about the education department’s proposed budget for next fiscal year.

But school budgets may not need the extra cushion this year. Unlike the significant drops over the past few years, the education department is projecting enrollment to largely hold steady next year, dipping by less than 1%

The move represents a shift from what happened last summer, when budget cuts tied to declining enrollment, sparked severe backlash, including a lawsuit, and forced schools to shrink staff and programming.

It also comes as Mayor Eric Adams has proposed cutting the education department’s budget by 3% next fiscal year, which begins July 1. That $30.5 billion budget is expected to include less spending on fringe benefits and cut a previously announced expansion of preschool for 3-year-olds.

The decision to start the new school year with steady budgets, however, doesn’t mean schools are completely immune from cuts. Banks said the city hasn’t yet decided whether schools will see cuts during what’s known as the “mid-year adjustment”— a practice put on pause this year using $200 million in federal COVID relief dollars.

Schools get money in the summer based on the city’s enrollment projections, and when the final tallies are taken on Oct. 31, schools could lose money mid-year if they’ve enrolled fewer students than projected — or get extra money if they have more children.

“If a school has 500 students, but by the middle of the year, they’ve dropped down to 200 students, we’re not going to make the commitment today to say, ‘No matter what, there’ll be no adjustment even at that point,’” Banks said during the hearing.

That might leave some school leaders with tough decisions. While principals might get the same amount of money as last year, they may be hesitant to hire more teachers or create more programming in anticipation of losing money during the school year.

One the one hand, some city principals said they understand the city’s desire to bring funding more in line with enrollment to avoid big disparities in per-student spending between schools.

“There are schools that are serving many fewer students than they were five years ago, and the city can’t afford to just fund those schools endlessly,” said a Brooklyn principal who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

But on the other hand, the principal wishes that the education department would make it easier for schools to plan by promising budgets will not be cut more than a certain percentage in a given year rather than having to make educated guesses.

And even if a school does not have to return money later in the year, it can be difficult to use before the spending deadline, especially to hire staff. If a school has an unexpected surplus in January, “all of a sudden there’s a spending spree and it’s not effective and efficient,” the principal said. “It doesn’t help to get money in November or January if you needed to hire a teacher in September.”

Schools are expected to receive their budgets by the end of this month, said Emma Vadehra, chief operating officer for the education department. When principals receive those budgets, Vadehra said, they might notice cuts to individual funding streams, such as Fair Student Funding, which is the city’s main school funding formula. (Schools with higher needs and higher enrollment get more money under the formula.)

Such drops will be backfilled with “other funding streams” to hold budgets steady, Vadehra said. However, officials did not clarify how schools will be able to use those funds. While Fair Student Funding can be used to hire teachers, money from other pots can sometimes be restricted for other uses.

The education department plans to use funding from multiple sources to keep budgets level at the start of the school year, Vadehra said. That includes a $160 million in federal stimulus funds that had been announced previously, as well as money from the state, which has boosted dollars for districts through its own school funding formula, known as Foundation Aid.

Several council members raised concerns about education department programs that are relying on expiring federal stimulus dollars, including preschool programming and expanded summer programming. Vadehra acknowledged that the education department does not yet have a plan on how to fund these initiatives once the money runs out in 2024.

“This is a major challenge,” Banks said to council members. “I mean, there’s a lot of great programs — even as we came on board — that have been built off of access to these stimulus dollars. The stimulus dollars are going away. We’re going to have to work very closely together to try to figure this out.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

High-dosage tutoring is still hard. Here’s what schools have learned.

2023-05-17T16:40:31+00:00

Christy Borders is frank about the “pain points” Illinois has faced while working to get an intensive tutoring initiative up and running.

Officials underestimated how much they’d have to pay tutors. Some schools offered tutoring after school, but few students attended. Even with training, tutors didn’t always use the tried-and-true strategies for helping students.

To course-correct, state officials boosted pay to $50 an hour, helped schools redesign their programs to offer tutoring during the school day, and coached tutors who needed support.

“The truth is that there are a lot of scabbed knees and bruises in this work,” Borders, who oversees the state’s tutoring effort, said at a conference held last week at Stanford University about the future of tutoring. “Not going to sugar coat this, guys. It’s hard work.”

Early in the pandemic, experts identified high-dosage tutoring — the kind that’s offered multiple times per week, in small groups, with a consistent tutor — as a potentially successful strategy for helping students plug learning gaps. But more than two years into a national push to expand the reach of tutoring, many schools are still struggling with basics, like how to staff and schedule their programs.

Now, as COVID relief funds dwindle, some big questions remain, including: What are the best ways to get high-dosage tutoring to more students? And how can schools keep their programs going when those federal dollars are gone?

A key group of researchers, school leaders, and tutoring organizations attempted to answer some of those questions at the recent convening hosted by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford program that shares research and helps schools launch tutoring programs.

Here are some of the major takeaways from that event:

Some schools are ditching after-school tutoring

School leaders from New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and elsewhere said they tried to tutor students outside of regular school hours, but attendance was lackluster. As a result, some schools are changing their programs to offer extra help during the day — which typically involves overhauling school schedules.

“You have to blank slate it, start over, and redesign based on what is necessary for students,” said Penny Schwinn, the outgoing Tennessee education commissioner, who has overseen a statewide tutoring initiative that involves 87 districts and some 200,000 students. “For us, it is: Do the tutoring during the school day. That’s the only thing that has worked.”

In Tennessee, many schools are making that work by using academic intervention time that was set aside before the pandemic. Schools also are leaning on full-time tutors, who can make it easier to reach more students during school hours, Schwinn said.

Some districts had success changing elementary school schedules, but got tripped up trying to create classes for middle and high schoolers. In Ector County, Texas, school leaders slotted in virtual tutoring time at one middle school this school year and will be working that into the master schedules of more middle and high schools this fall. Doing that work in advance is key, educators said.

“We’ll hopefully have better attendance,” said Carina Escajeda, who oversees virtual tutoring for the district. “Those have been tough schools to really reach the students.”

There’s a push to use AI, but it’s unclear how much

Several researchers pointed to emerging evidence that has found schools can pair human tutors with software that uses artificial intelligence and still get strong results for students. That’s good news, they say, because it means schools could potentially offer tutoring to more students at a lower price.

In one recent study, for example, researchers found that ninth graders in Chicago and New York City who got daily math tutoring could spend about half their time with a tutor and the other half using a computer program and see results similar to students who spent an entire class with a live tutor. But there’s no consensus yet on exactly how much time students need to spend with a human tutor for it to remain effective.

“If we go too far it’s not going to be great,” said Jonathan Guryan, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University who was involved in that research.

Research is underway to see what the right balance may be. Though there’s broad agreement that students will still need a human connection.

“AI can support high-impact tutoring by making materials better, by giving tutors really good information on students,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education professor who’s involved in numerous tutoring studies. “Most students are still likely to need relationships to get them to work on the AI platforms and to help them thrive more broadly.”

Schools are measuring effects of tutoring in different ways

While some state and district leaders are working with researchers to rigorously study their tutoring programs, others say that’s not practical and are turning to things like attendance data, test scores, and student surveys to see if tutoring has moved the needle for students.

Experts say while that kind of descriptive data can be helpful, it won’t show whether it was the tutoring that made a difference, or not.

“If you don’t have the data, you can’t say if it’s not working,” said Shanitah Young, a director with the North Carolina Education Corps, which recruits and trains tutors to work in schools across the state. The organization’s program is being evaluated by Duke and North Carolina State universities. “It’s allowing us to say ‘Yes, these students have grown through tutoring,’ or ‘No, they have not.’”

There are several studies that are expected to be published this summer and fall that could help school districts make their programs more effective. That includes two gold-standard experiments looking at whether the tutor’s race or gender affect academic outcomes for students, and another rigorous study looking at whether student group size affects the quality of live virtual tutoring in reading.

Schools are preparing for the fiscal cliff

Schools and states had to set aside a large chunk of their COVID relief funds to address pandemic learning losses, and many put that toward tutoring. Still, by some estimates, only 1 in 10 students or fewer are getting that extra help.

Now, as those funds run out, school districts are looking for alternate ways to pay for their tutoring programs, or planning for cuts — raising questions about how many more students schools will be able to reach.

Some states, like Tennessee, have budgeted money to continue paying for high-dosage tutoring after federal COVID funds expire, while others, like Connecticut, are ramping up data collection to lobby state lawmakers for ongoing tutoring dollars.

Meanwhile, some school districts, like Texas’ Ector County, will be deciding whether they should cut ties with some of their more expensive tutoring providers, while other districts, like Guilford County, North Carolina, are taking on some longer-term costs by staffing a four-person department to oversee their tutoring work.

“Money is about to get very, very tight,” said Robin Lake, who heads the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has been tracking district academic recovery plans. “What we’re hearing from districts is they are overwhelmed by the challenge of core instruction. They can’t even get their heads around the idea of interventions and standing up new tutoring programs.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

COVID learning loss driven more by school and community factors than household ones, research finds

2023-05-12T21:05:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

Just as COVID hit some communities much harder than others, schools across the U.S. suffered disparate academic losses in the wake of the pandemic.

But new research points to a surprising finding: Students within the same district seemed to experience similar academic setbacks, regardless of their background. In the average district, white and more affluent students lost about the same amount of ground in reading and math as Black and Hispanic students and students from low-income families.

To researchers, that suggests that factors at the school district and community level — like whether students received quality remote instruction and whether communities experienced a strict lockdown — were bigger causes of test score declines than what was going on in students’ homes.

“Where children lived during the pandemic mattered more to their academic progress than their family background, income, or internet speed,” a team of researchers wrote in a report released Thursday.

The report offers some insight into why school districts experienced a wide range of academic losses during the pandemic. Citing pre-pandemic evidence that learning loss can persist for years without major interventions beyond normal instruction, it also points to the need for more intensive academic recovery efforts in some places. Those findings come as many schools are under pressure to reach more students with extra help like tutoring, and school leaders are trying to figure out the best ways to spend the limited COVID relief funding they have left.

But the report doesn’t get much closer to providing an answer to a key question that has evaded researchers: Why did school districts that stayed remote for similar lengths of time experience very different academic losses?

Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor of education and economics who co-authored the study, says that’s likely because researchers haven’t found a way to reliably measure factors that may have had a big impact, such as the quality of instruction students received.

“It’s like the suspect that we couldn’t find and question,” he said.

The team included researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins universities, as well as the testing group NWEA. Together, they looked at data from 7,800 school districts in 40 states, focusing on reading and math scores from state and federal tests for students in third to eighth grades.

Then the team looked to build on earlier research released last fall that found academic losses were steeper in districts that served larger shares of Black and Hispanic students and students from low-income families, and in districts that stayed remote or offered a mix of in-person and virtual instruction for longer.

This time, the researchers looked at several more factors that they thought could have had an effect on student’s math and reading scores during the pandemic.

These included whether students had access to the internet and a device at home; school staffing levels; whether residents had trust in their local institutions, like schools; employment rates; COVID death rates; anxiety and depression rates; and the degree to which COVID caused social and economic disruptions in a community. (To identify those disruptions, the research team looked at how often people did activities such as shop for groceries, eat at a restaurant, or socialize with people outside their home, using a combination of cell phone, Google, and Facebook survey data.)

The team found that student test scores fell more, especially in math, in places where families saw their daily routines more significantly restricted — a finding that held true even in places where schools closed only for a short time. Math losses also were greater in counties that had higher death rates from COVID.

Meanwhile, learning losses associated with remote instruction were smaller in places that reported greater trust in their local institutions, perhaps because parents supported their local school district’s pandemic decision-making.

Math learning losses stemming from virtual learning were bigger in places where adults reported higher levels of anxiety and depression, and in communities that had higher employment rates. In those cases, researchers wrote, parents may not have been as able to support their kids when they were learning from home.

‘Extraordinary’ measures needed to help students recover academically

Still, the additional factors explain only a “little bit” of why academic losses varied so much in places that stayed remote longer, Kane said. And they don’t explain why high-poverty school districts that serve more students of color lost more academic ground when they stayed remote for longer.

That may be because researchers haven’t yet found a way to measure some of the most important factors. The team wasn’t able to look at community COVID hospitalization rates, for example. They also couldn’t take into account the quality of remote instruction students received, or what policies districts set for student attendance and engagement during remote learning.

Remote instruction varied widely, especially early in the pandemic. Some schools required students to attend classes on live video for several hours a day, while others gave students more independent work.

In some places, teachers received little training on how to teach students virtually. In other places, teachers had to juggle students who were both at home and in front of them — a setup that often left parents and students more dissatisfied with the instructional quality.

“In some schools remote instruction was a watered-down version of in-person instruction,” Kane said. “In other places, there was just much less of an expectation that classes would be covering the usual grade-level standards online. We just don’t have a direct measure of the quality of remote/hybrid instruction and the level of expectations.”

The researchers also found evidence that in the decade leading up to the pandemic, when districts saw big dips in test scores — perhaps because there was a strong flu season, or a weak teaching team that year — their students tended not to recover as they progressed through later grades.

That suggests, according to the researchers, that it will be difficult for students to recover from the pandemic unless their schools take “extraordinary” measures, like expanding summer school and tutoring many more students. Chalkbeat previously reported that in many of the nation’s largest districts, fewer than 1 in 10 students got any kind of tutoring earlier this school year.

“When there is a disruption, it’s not like they know how to hurry up,” Kane said. “They will proceed with their lesson plans and instruction. It’s easy to resume learning — it’s very hard to accelerate it.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

At least $391 per child in pandemic food benefits is coming to each NYC public school family

2023-05-10T17:48:04+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

New York City public school families, regardless of income, will soon receive a new allotment of food benefits of at least $391 per child, according state officials.

Known as the Coronavirus Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT, the federal program aims to help families whose children typically receive free meals at school — and since New York City public schools have universal meals, all families are eligible.

The latest disbursement of funds — which could total up to $1,671 per child based on COVID-related absences or remote-learning days — is based on the 2021-22 school year and the summer of 2022. The rollout began in April, with most payments posting this month, according to the state. Officials expect distribution to continue through September.

Since May 2020, the state has doled out $4.3 billion in P-EBT benefits, including over $1 billion for the 2019-20 school year, and more than $3.2 billion for the 2020-21 school year and summer 2021, according to state officials.

Advocates have praised the program for providing families with much-needed support and boosting the local economy.

“We know that food insecurity prior to the pandemic was a major problem in New York City,” said Liz Accles, executive director of Community Food Advocates. “It’s only gotten exponentially worse since the pandemic, so any ongoing support is really essential.”

Who is eligible?

All families with children who attended K-12 in New York City public schools last school year are eligible for food benefits. Those in charter, private, and other schools, or pre-K, who received free meals through the federal school lunch program are also eligible.

Children under 6 years-old as of September 2021 who received federal SNAP food assistance in the months between then and August are also eligible for food benefits.

Families are eligible regardless of their immigration status.

How are benefits calculated?

All K-12 children who receive free lunch at school will receive a $391 summer food benefit. So will children under 6 years old as of September 2021 who received SNAP money in June, July, or August 2022.

For each month of the 2021-22 school year, families (including those with pre-K children) will also receive $21 per month that their child was absent or remote from one to five days of school. That increases to $78 per month that their child missed from six to 15 days, and $128 per month that they missed 16 days or more.

Children under 6 years old as of September 2021 who received SNAP food assistance will also get up to $310 in food benefits, with $31 distributed for each month they received SNAP money between then and June.

How are benefits distributed?

Most families will not have to apply to receive their benefits, according to the state.

The state will automatically distribute the money to students who were absent or remote for five or more consecutive days of school.

If parents want to indicate that an absence not automatically covered by the state was also COVID-19 related, they will have to submit a P-EBT Food Benefit application to the state. The online application will be available from May 15 until Aug. 15.

How do you access the food benefits?

Families who previously received food benefits during the 2019-20 or 2020-21 school years will receive the latest benefits on the same P-EBT card, while newly eligible children will be mailed a card.

Those who have lost their P-EBT card can get a replacement by calling 1-888-328-6399.

Families that receive SNAP, state Temporary Assistance, or Medicaid benefits will get their disbursements directly added to those accounts.

The money can only be spent on food items.

Why do the benefits matter?

Nearly 30% of New York parents worried their household would not have enough food, according to a poll of state residents conducted last month by No Kid Hungry, a national campaign run by the nonprofit Share Our Strength. Two-thirds, meanwhile, reported experiencing stress, anxiety, and depression in the past year due to food insecurity.

“We know that families with kids in public school are having to make very hard trade-offs right now, deciding between buying food or paying rent, purchasing clothes, or just keeping the lights on,” said Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry NY. “Our recent data indicates that the hunger crisis is worsening in New York, so supporting families with P-EBT funds they can use to put food on the table will be a lifeline for many New Yorkers.”

Accles noted the benefits are particularly important now that some pandemic relief programs have expired.

“When schools are functioning in full force, a child has access to two solid meals a day,” Accles said. “For a family struggling to make ends meet, that’s a significant amount of resources that a family could save.”

She urged families to treat the benefits as they would stimulus funding, noting that spending them supports families and bolsters the local economy.

“Spend it, use it, buy food that you need,” she said.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s education budget could drop by $960M next year under mayor’s proposal

2023-04-27T00:19:25+00:00

The city’s education department budget would drop by nearly $960 million next school year under a more detailed budget proposal released by Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday, though city officials did not offer specifics about the impact on individual campuses.

Two-thirds of that cut, or $652 million, is the result of Adams’ decision to reduce the city’s contribution to the education department. Another $297 million is from a drop in federal funding, which is drying up as pandemic relief programs end.

Part of the city’s cut is tied to a mandate from the mayor earlier this month calling on city agencies to cut spending, including at the education department. That raised questions about whether schools would take a hit, but on Wednesday, Adams vowed that this specific cost-saving measure “will not take a dime from classrooms.”

Instead, that reduction — totaling $325 million — will largely come from recalculations on how much the city spends in fringe benefits, such as health insurance for teachers. (Officials emphasized this would not result in a loss of benefits or other services.)

“We had to make tough choices in this budget,” Adams said Wednesday. “We had to negotiate competing needs. We realize that not everyone will be happy but that is okay because that is how you get stuff done.”

The education department’s operating budget would total about $30.5 billion next year under the mayor’s plan, down by about 3%.

Some of the cuts were previously announced, including the elimination of a planned expansion of prekindergarten for 3-year-olds. Other impacts of the cuts may come into focus in the coming days as experts and journalists pore over reams of budget documents, which were released late Wednesday afternoon.

Adams has argued school budgets should reflect falling enrollment, but city officials declined to say what overall change they expect to individual school budgets next year. That question is likely to draw intense scrutiny after the City Council was heavily criticized last year for approving a budget that resulted in cuts to many campuses.

After the pandemic hit, Mayor Bill de Blasio used federal relief money to keep school budgets steady even as enrollment plunged. But as the spigot of federal money is drying up, Adams has started reducing budgets to line up with the number of students enrolled at each school, resulting in cuts on the majority of campuses. (Since the start of the pandemic, enrollment dropped about 11% in K-12.)

Next year, Adams plans to use $160 million of federal money to avoid deeper cuts to school budgets. Officials anticipate a much smaller enrollment decline than in recent years, which could insulate schools to some degree.

The budget is not final and must still be negotiated with the City Council. A final deal is due by July 1.

The proposed budget also includes funding for various other items, including services that advocates had been pushing for the mayor to include. Those are:

$3.3 million for keeping a chunk of the city’s new shelter-based coordinators, who are supposed to help families and children who are homeless navigate school enrollment and transportation. The funding for these coordinators was set to run out this June.
$9 million for a telehealth program for high school students who need mental health support.
$2 million for training up to 1,000 teachers in climate education.

The mayor’s budget received a mixed reception from advocates, union officials, and budget experts. Kim Sweet, executive director at the nonprofit Advocates for Children, praised the funding for shelter coordinators, but raised alarms about broader spending cuts — including to a program that provides extra mental health services to students at 50 high-need high schools, and another that provides free child care for undocumented families.

“We are concerned that the Mayor is proposing to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from our City’s schools at a time when there are so many unmet needs,” Sweet said in a statement, including high rates of chronic absenteeism and shortages in services for students with disabilities.

Still, Adams has argued that the city needs to tighten its belt due to costs associated with serving an influx of asylum seekers and potential economic headwinds.

Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the budget watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission, said her organization is worried the city isn’t properly planning now for big budget shortfalls that are expected in future years. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars of federal relief funding for the education department that will disappear in 2024 and could leave several programs and services unfunded.

“From our point of view there is still a major challenge fiscally for the city that’s not far off,” Champeny said. “We really should be taking action now.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

It’s often hard to tutor students during the school day. A new initiative seeks to change that

2023-04-26T14:00:00+00:00

Many schools want to tutor students during the school day, when research shows they are more likely to benefit from the extra help.

But one roadblock continues to stymie school leaders: Students often can’t squeeze tutoring into their schedule.

A new $10 million initiative announced on Wednesday aims to change that by tapping five states to set up tutoring programs and develop model policies other states could copy.

The goal is to make it easier for schools across the country to get help to kids during the school day — at a critical time when COVID funds are winding down and many tutoring programs have reached only a small fraction of students.

“What we’ve seen is evidence showing that out-of-school tutoring just doesn’t have as high of an uptake,” said Kevin Huffman, the head of the nonprofit Accelerate, which awarded $5 million in grants to the states. “If you’re going to serve the highest-need kids, you have to figure out how to embed it during the school day.”

Each of the states that were chosen for the initiative — Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, and Ohio — will spend $1 million of their own money and receive another $1 million from Accelerate, which was launched last year by the nonprofit America Achieves with the help of $65 million in private philanthropy. (That included money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which also funds Chalkbeat.)

Accelerate also is involved in two sweeping research efforts announced last year that are looking at tutoring initiatives across the country to identify programs that are worth schools’ time and money.

States in the newly announced initiative will tackle similar work.

That could include providing districts with advice on how to set up a school day to fit in tutoring for more students without running afoul of any state or federal rules. Or it could mean setting up better systems to track which students are getting tutored, how often, and whether the tutoring helped.

States may also assemble lists of companies that can back up their tutoring with research for districts to consult, and help districts draft contracts that require tutoring companies to demonstrate how they’ve helped students before they can get paid.

Some districts and states have cut ties with virtual tutoring companies that provide on-demand help, for example, after paying them millions in COVID relief funds only to find few students used the service.

“There are some programs and providers that haven’t delivered the kinds of results that they said they were going to deliver, whether that’s dosage, or attendance, or impact,” Huffman said. And some programs haven’t collected good data. “It’s really difficult for a district, especially a smaller district, to know who is good, and who is not good.”

The five states also will work with school districts to launch tutoring programs for elementary and middle schoolers in reading and math for the upcoming school year. It will be up to the school districts to decide who will staff those programs — Arkansas, for example, plans to use adults from the state’s tutor corps — but Huffman expects much of the tutoring work will be done in person.

The $10 million initiative may seem small compared to the billions schools received in federal funding during the pandemic, Huffman said, but Accelerate chose these states with an eye for coming up with policies that will support tutoring in the long run.

“Everybody is trying to figure out” what to do after the COVID relief funding runs out, he said. “Our hope is that, collectively, these five states working together will help figure out answers to some of these questions.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Student access to teletherapy skyrockets as schools combat youth mental health crisis

2023-04-19T09:00:00+00:00

This story was co-published with USA Today.

Kirstin Smith was worried after her 5-year-old had a traumatic interaction with another student at school this past fall.

Her daughter’s behavior had changed — she was hiding under desks at school and waking up scared from her nightmares. Smith wanted to get her some help.

A couple months later, the kindergartner was sitting cross-legged on her mother’s bed, chatting with “her lady” on a laptop screen while Smith stirred macaroni in the kitchen. Every so often, Smith pressed her ear to the bedroom door or cracked it open to check in.

The virtual therapist met weekly with Smith’s daughter for the next three months, teaching her how to breathe deeply to stay calm and when to seek help from a trusted adult.

“I am happy that she was able to build that relationship with her therapist remotely,” Smith said. “When she gets overwhelmed, she knows that she’s overwhelmed, versus her feeling like she did something wrong or something is wrong with her.”

The number of U.S. students with access to virtual mental health support has skyrocketed over the last year. Thirteen of the nation’s 20 largest districts have added teletherapy since the pandemic began, expanding access to hundreds of thousands of students, a Chalkbeat review found. That includes Clark County schools in Nevada, where Smith’s daughter attends school. Two more big districts plan to add the service later this year.

The rise of teletherapy is a reflection of the intense pressure schools are under to address a youth mental health crisis that shows no sign of waning. The services offer a way to reach more students without bringing on full-time staff that are often difficult and expensive to recruit. And while some educators and parents have been skeptical of the virtual setup, many say they’ve since been won over.

“This does eliminate barriers,” said Nirmita Panchal, who’s written about the growth of tele-mental health in schools for the nonprofit KFF, which conducts health policy research. “There are definitely some challenges, but big picture, we do see the advantages in linking students who otherwise wouldn’t have care into care.”

Schools see benefits to teletherapy

School leaders say the wait time to see a therapist virtually is often days, instead of weeks or months. Teletherapy can get help to more kids with moderate needs, who often don’t get seen at school because staffers are focused on kids in crisis. It can also bring some relief to kids with bigger challenges while they wait for more intensive in-person care.

And it’s often easier to match a student with someone who speaks their family’s language or is of a particular race, gender, or cultural background when schools have access to a larger national pool of therapists.

That helped persuade Ellen Wingard, who oversees student support services for the schools in Salem, Massachusetts. Her district started offering teletherapy through a local mental health center and the company Cartwheel in January. Initially, she worried it would be “a waste of time.”

“I was very hesitant,” she said. “I was like: ‘Our kids do not want to do that.’”

But she’s been impressed by how the teletherapy has reached students who never got past a referral from their school counselor to seek help outside their school before. School staff have come to her in surprise, saying: “Wait, they what? They found a male counselor?” Wingard said.

Another upside is that schools can offer teletherapy to students at home or on campus. Some families like that they can easily supervise their child and check in with them after a session at home. At school, students typically go to a private space where they can slip on headphones and talk with a therapist on an iPad while a nurse or counselor supervises nearby. Then they can return to class without much disruption to their day.

“It’s not for everybody, but for those students and parents who want that, it’s been fantastic,” said JaMaiia Bond, who oversees student mental health services for Compton’s schools in California, which started offering teletherapy through Hazel Health this school year.

At Compton Unified schools, students can meet virtually with a therapist in a private room in their school’s wellness center.

The San Francisco-based company has become the top player in providing teletherapy to the nation’s largest school systems. By this fall, Hazel will be working with half of the country’s 20 biggest districts.

Nationally, since Hazel launched its tele-mental health service last school year, the number of students who can access teletherapy through the company has shot up from just under a million students at 20 districts to more than 2 million students at 70 districts, according to a Hazel spokesperson — a figure that does not yet include a new $24 million teletherapy initiative for students across Los Angeles County.

Schools spend millions on virtual mental health support

Among Hazel’s clients are Clark County schools in the Las Vegas area, which spent $2.6 million on teletherapy over the last two school years, records obtained by Chalkbeat show. Hawaii is spending $3.8 million on Hazel’s virtual therapy over three years, while the Houston school district set aside $5 million for teletherapy and virtual primary care services over the next five years. Fairfax County schools in Virginia are expected to spend nearly $700,000 on Hazel’s teletherapy. And Hillsborough County schools in Florida are launching a two-year $2 million teletherapy initiative through Hazel this fall.

Others have stayed local. Some Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools offer teletherapy through a local hospital funded by a $10 million donation. And Mississippi is offering teletherapy statewide through the University of Mississippi Medical Center. The initiative is funded by $17.6 million in federal COVID relief dollars.

That money helps cover equipment, training for school staff, fees, and in some cases, the therapy. Mississippi, for example, is covering the full cost of students’ sessions to avoid insurance headaches for families.

There are some drawbacks and limitations. Younger children and some students with disabilities may find the technology difficult to use, educators say. In Mississippi, some districts decided not to offer teletherapy because they were worried about overburdening their few school nurses. And some districts prefer to connect students to local mental health professionals.

“They understand the community,” said BJ Wilson, the interim special services director for Grandview School District in Washington, which is weighing whether it wants to hire Hazel to offer teletherapy. “That’s really important to say: ‘I live three blocks from you, I know exactly what you’re talking about.’”

Some also worry that expanded access to teletherapy could reduce the urgency to offer students in-person care, which many kids need or prefer. That’s especially true for families that lack a stable internet connection at home, or don’t have a quiet, private space for kids to meet virtually with a mental health professional.

Getting families on board can also take work. Generally, schools must obtain consent from a legal guardian to offer teletherapy to students, though in some states students can consent to mental health treatment themselves.

In Houston, Diego Linares has been hosting “coffee with the principal” events so he can show families how to sign up for his high school’s new teletherapy offering through Hazel. He makes sure parents know the teletherapy is always free to their children and that immigration officials won’t see anything they share.

“When your immigration status is important for you and you worry about it, you don’t want to put your name on things that may get you in trouble,” Linares said. “This is important for them to understand that this is really for the benefit of the students.”

Will teletherapy disappear when COVID funds run out?

Whether schools will offer teletherapy long term remains an open question. Some in Congress want to create more permanent funding, but right now many school districts are relying on temporary COVID relief funds.

Student usage will likely be a determining factor. Right now, numbers tend to be small as many programs are just getting started.

Hawaii’s schools referred almost 1,000 students for virtual mental health support between last August and mid-March, said Fern Yoshida, who oversees the teletherapy initiative for the state education department. That’s less than 1% of Hawaii’s students, but Yoshida said they’re comfortable with that number for now, since it represents students who otherwise may not have gotten help.

“We’re going to evaluate to see how this goes,” Yoshida said. “But we’ve been finding that this has really fit.”

Some students who’ve turned to teletherapy see promise in the service.

Eighteen-year-old Fatima Magallon found out that her Las Vegas high school was offering teletherapy when Hazel paid students there a small stipend for their ideas on how to improve the company’s service.

Not long after, Magallon’s grandmother died. Magallon’s grades started dropping, and when a school counselor told the senior she may not graduate on time, she decided to give the teletherapy a try.

The initial sessions were awkward, Magallon said, but eventually she felt like she could open up. It was especially helpful when the therapist tried to make it feel like they were together in person.

“She would open her blinds and I would open mine,” said Magallon, who graduated last June. “Seeing light through the Zoom, it actually helped a lot.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Many IPS schools are losing nurses staffed through IU Health, prompting parent concerns

2023-04-18T11:00:00+00:00

Nineteen schools in Indianapolis Public Schools will lose their nurses provided through Indiana University Health when this school year ends, prompting concerns from parents about schools’ ability to respond to emergency health situations or oversee other health care needs.

The announcement from IPS last month means IU Health will end its three-year pilot with the district prematurely. The district, meanwhile, has said that it will search for other nursing providers to fill in at those schools — although four of the 19 are slated to close at the end of this school year.

The partnership with IU Health was meant to last from 2021 to 2024 with funding from federal coronavirus relief dollars. But Indiana University officials cite the nursing shortage as a ubiquitous challenge that has worsened since the start of the pandemic. IU Health officials did not detail why staff shortages prompted it to pull the plug on the nursing program in IPS, but said in a statement it is investing in its workforce to ensure it can meet patient demand and “provide the best clinical care possible.”

The end of the IU Health partnership could leave a large number of IPS schools without a registered nurse or licensed practical nurse to dispense medication or respond to health emergencies, such as hypoglycemic shock. IPS board documents from April 2022 show that 49 buildings out of the district’s 76 school programs (a figure that includes traditional district schools and those in the IPS Innovation network) had either a nurse employed by IPS, a health professional staffed through IU Health, or a school-based health center.

“We understand the vital role that school nurses play in ensuring the health and safety of our children and we are working in close partnership with IPS to find alternative solutions and ensure a seamless transition for student care,” Melissa Cash, vice president of retail and employer health solutions at IU Health, said in a statement.

The district did not respond to several requests for comment, but said in its March statement that it is exploring other potential ways to keep nurses at the schools.

“We have begun early conversations with other community partners who are eager to come alongside IPS to continue this invaluable service,” the district said.

The news has left some parents concerned about whether their children will have their health needs properly addressed while at school.

Krista Searles, whose daughter at Butler Lab School 55 has asthma and a condition known as ketotic hypoglycemia, said having a qualified nurse at the school provides an extra layer of protection for her if she becomes hypoglycemic.

But there are other students at her daughter’s school who have even greater health care needs, said Searles, who is a nurse herself.

“I think it’s really important that we’re providing those resources in the community because those kids are already working hard enough just to get through the day,” she said.

Searles also worries that the lack of nurses at some schools — particularly those that offer special programming such as Butler Lab — could also exacerbate educational inequities.

“It really creates a lot of disparities for kids with more significant health care needs and it really limits their educational options,” she said.

COVID fallout, salary disparities affect school nurses

School nurse shortages have been a perennial issue in Indiana and across the country. Indiana Administrative Code recommends a ratio of one registered nurse for every 750 students, but does not impose any penalty on districts that don’t meet that ratio.

A November 2018 report from the Indiana Department of Education found that 1,017 nurses responding to a statewide survey reported a ratio of roughly one nurse per 917 students.

State code does require, however, that school districts hire at least one registered nurse with a bachelor of science in nursing to coordinate all health services.

In the absence of a school nurse, state law allows school staff to administer certain medications or health care services to students with immunity from any damages in a potential civil lawsuit that may follow. Registered nurses can also delegate certain tasks to those without nursing credentials.

School nurses were often receiving the brunt of parent anger over health rulings during COVID, said Deb Robarge, executive director of the Indiana Association of School Nurses.

“There’s been a lot of older nurses saying, ‘I don’t need this, I was doing this because I loved doing it for the kids,’” she said. “And they had a pretty good relationship with their families and stuff. But just as the U.S. in general has descended into so much incivility to each other, I think school nurses and teachers and administrators have more of the brunt of a lot of that.”

School nurses also generally make less than nurses in a hospital setting, Robarge said.

A 2022 report from the Indiana Governor’s Public Health Commission recommended implementing policies to improve the student-to-nurse ratio and to address low pay.

Board documents show that registered nurses provided through IU Health had a maximum pay of $57 an hour working 37.5 hours per week, while licensed practical nurses had a maximum pay of $33 an hour.

Parents at schools slated to lose nurses through IU Health hope the district will be able to keep nurses at their schools.

“She does so much for our students and helps our teachers focus on their job: teaching,” Megan Alderman, a parent at Center for Inquiry School 70, wrote in a public comment to the school board last month. “Without our school nurse, medical care will once again be relegated to our teachers who do not have medical training and are busy in the classroom.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Summer Rising applications are now open. Here’s everything you need to know.

2023-04-14T20:30:55+00:00

Applications open Monday for New York City’s free, sprawling summer program for children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The program was first launched in 2021 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, using federal COVID relief money, as a way to help children ease into school following remote learning. The rollout of the program was bumpy, but for the first time, it provided a mix of academics and enrichment activities to many children beyond those who are mandated to attend summer school.

In its third year, the program will again have 110,000 spots and will be open to any child in New York City, including children who are home-schooled or attend charter or private schools.

But a couple things will be different from last year, including the application process. Spots won’t be assigned on a first come, first served basis this year; instead, parents will rank multiple choices. In another change, students who already attend a school associated with a Summer Rising site will be added to the list of groups receiving priority in selection for that site.

Parents who want to apply should visit this website when the application opens on Monday.

Here’s what you should know about this year’s Summer Rising program:

Where are the programs, and when will Summer Rising start?

Programs won’t be in every school. Rather, each school will be associated with one of 374 sites across the five boroughs.

The program length will depend on a few things. Programs will run from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. from July 5 to Aug. 18 for children in kindergarten through fifth grade and until Aug. 11 for middle schoolers.

Students with disabilities who have yearlong individualized education programs, or IEPs, will attend programs from July 5 to Aug. 14, from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Students at District 75 schools, which serve children with the most challenging disabilities, will attend programs that run from July 6 to Aug. 15, also from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Students in Nest and Horizon programs, which serve students with autism, who have 12-month IEPs, will attend a monthlong program from July 5 to Aug. 1, from 8 a.m. to noon.

What will my children do?

Generally, students will spend the morning on academics and then in the afternoons participate in enrichment activities, such as sports, arts and crafts or going on field trips. Elementary-age children will spend the last week of their program on enrichment activities and trips, according to the education department website. (Enrichment activities are run by community-based organizations.)

Students with disabilities will receive extra services that are mandated in their IEPs, including services from health and behavioral paraprofessionals, according to the department’s website. For these students, their school will create an accommodation plan for the summer that will be provided to their parents and the Summer Rising site before their program begins.

Students with disabilities are supposed to receive services “as needed” during the enrichment portion of the day, according to the department’s website. If a family doesn’t want the enrichment portion, they should contact their child’s school instead of using the online application. These children can choose on the application to participate in extended-day enrichment programming until 6 p.m.

Last year, several families reported that their children did not have special education support by the start of Summer Rising, said Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children. She said it’s “important that planning begin early” so that students aren’t left without the services they need.

Will my child get transportation to the program?

Generally, students who are already eligible for busing during the school year — typically in grades K-6 — will receive busing to their summer program but not past 3 p.m. This includes students with disabilities whose IEPs recommend busing, as well as students in temporary housing and students in foster care who are more than a half-mile away from their Summer Rising site.

For children who want to participate in programming until 6 p.m. and need transportation, families will have the option of a prepaid rideshare service. However, a caregiver must take the rideshare service to and from the summer site to pick up their child, which some advocates have said is not manageable for working parents.

Eligible students who receive MetroCards during the school year can also get MetroCards from their Summer Rising site, or if their site is more than a half-mile from their home.

Students who are not eligible for busing during the school year could receive transportation if their regular school is not open for Summer Rising and their site is more than a half-mile away.

How will the application work?

Seats rapidly filled up last year, quickly elbowing out many families who wanted to apply, according to some advocacy and community-based organizations.

This year, instead of the first come, first served model, families will be asked to rank up to 12 choices for program sites, “ensuring that more families receive placements that work for them,” according to a news release.

Like last year, priority will be offered to students in temporary housing, in foster care, who are mandated for summer school, and with disabilities who have year-round individualized education programs. But also, students who have a “local connection” to their school will also be prioritized, such as if they attend the school during the year. Last month, city officials said students who attend city subsidized after-school programs will also be prioritized.

Asked how these groups will be ranked, an education department spokesperson said they’re aiming to give every child in a priority group access to their first choice.

The application will close May 1, and families should be notified the following week of where their child will attend the program, according to the department website.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

As NYC is expected to spend $38K per student, budget watchdog calls for prioritizing ‘critical services’

2023-04-11T04:01:00+00:00

Buoyed in recent years by billions in federal stimulus dollars, New York City is slated to spend about $38,000 per student next school year — the most in recent history — as enrollment is again expected to drop, according to a new report published Tuesday.

The report, from Citizens Budget Commission, or CBC, a budget watchdog group, comes as the education department faces 3% in cuts for next year. Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council are in the middle of budget planning for the next fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

Many of the CBC’s findings focus on the period from fiscal year 2016 through 2022, since the current fiscal year, 2023, isn’t over yet. Some of the report’s highlights include:

In that time period, the education department’s spending per pupil has increased by 47%, in large part due to the $7 billion in federal COVID aid the district received as enrollment has dipped. Three school years from now, in fiscal year 2026, CBC projects the city could be spending as much as $44,000 per student.
Spending grew the most in three areas: early childhood education, at 65%, covering private school tuition, such as for students with disabilities, by 79%, and for charter schools, by 84%. This was fueled by enrollment growth in these specific areas.
Spending related to schools, such as for instruction, grew by about 34%. Spending on school services, such as transportation, food, and safety, grew at a similar rate.
Spending on school support, such as special education instructional costs, grew by about 15%. And spending on central costs, including central administration, fringe benefits, pension contributions, and debt service, saw the slowest growth – by 8%.

CBC called for officials to prioritize programs and services for next year that are most effective and shed others. It also notes that the city faces financial pressures over the next several years, which the Adams administration has also emphasized as they’ve imposed stricter savings targets on city agencies. Those challenges include labor costs that will stem from new union contracts, including with the United Federation of Teachers, and a potential recession.

“We can’t do everything for everyone, so we need to start focusing on the most impactful interventions,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission.

New York City spends the most per pupil among the nation’s largest school districts. That cost grew as federal dollars were poured into the school system and enrollment dropped significantly after the onset of the pandemic. Dips in enrollment are likely due to several factors, including demographic changes and the cost of living in New York, which are leading many families to find homes elsewhere.

Roughly one-third of the department’s spending growth between 2016 and 2022 was due to federal pandemic aid, which is set to run out by 2024, CBC’s report found.

Advocates and educators have decried the potential cuts to the education department — amounting up to $421 million — as students continue to struggle with a host of challenges, including mental health, chronic absenteeism, and recovering academically after remote learning. Cuts to school budgets this school year resulted in some schools losing teachers, having larger class sizes, and cutting some programming, such as art and music classes.

Research has found that more money usually leads to better schools. New York, however, is in a puzzling situation: Despite being the leading state in spending per pupil, students score in the middle of the pack on national math and reading tests.

It’s possible to make cuts through central or support costs, such as through transportation contracts, and “avoid cuts to school budgets,” the CBC report notes.

While CBC doesn’t make specific recommendations, Champeny said such cuts could mean negotiating cheaper transportation-related contracts. The department could also look for ways to reduce private school placements for children with disabilities, commonly known as “Carter Cases,” a cost that ballooned under former Mayor Bill de Blasio and continues to grow.

More immediately, however, the group called on the department to be “transparent” about the future of a slate of programs that are currently relying on federal pandemic relief, which other organizations and advocates have also pressed for. These programs include expanded summer school, new prekindergarten seats for students with disabilities, and screening for dyslexia and other literacy programs – an area that Adams is increasingly making one of his signature projects.

Nathaniel Styer, a spokesperson for the Department of Education said, “This Administration has been open and honest about the long-term combined challenges of declining enrollment, programs funded by one-time federal stimulus dollars, and rising costs tied to unfunded mandates from the State.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan schools turn to COVID relief funds to upgrade aging buildings

2023-03-29T23:15:42+00:00

As many as 32 students crowd into classrooms originally meant for 22 to 24 students in the Crestwood School District.

Many of Crestwood’s buildings were built in the 1960s, said Youssef Mosallam, superintendent of the district in Dearborn Heights. But updates have been few and far between for the district’s needs, the superintendent said.

Then came a small fortune from the federal government: $24 million in COVID relief funds for the district of nearly 3,800 students. At least $8 million of the relief money is going to build 12 new classrooms in the district’s elementary schools, to reduce class sizes and to keep students spaced farther apart, he said.

Dozens of school districts across Michigan are also directing relief funds to rehab aging school buildings, some of which lack air conditioning or functioning heating systems. In rural Harrison Community Schools north of Mount Pleasant, Superintendent Judy Walton said that means heat may work in one side of a school building in the morning and the other side in the afternoon. The district hasn’t had the funding to make updates for years, she said.

For school districts in lower-income areas like Harrison, relief funds have covered essential facility upgrades that annual state funding and bond money don’t.

“We’re probably one of the most economically depressed counties in Michigan,” Walton said. “So the availability of those funds to do those HVAC upgrades was really critical for us.”

Michigan’s public schools planned to spend about 18% of relief funds on buildings and facilities needs, according to a May 2022 analysis of approved school district plans by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, around $641 million at that time. Since the analysis, more spending has likely been approved. In all, Michigan schools have nearly $6 billion in COVID relief funds to spend by September 2024.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Chalkbeat Detroit, the Detroit Free Press, and Bridge Michigan have teamed up to find out where the money is going, who is benefiting, and whether the money is helping students get back on track academically, emotionally, and socially.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

The largest district in the state, Detroit Public Schools Community District, is also allocating roughly half of its more than $1 billion in relief funds to building needs, a total not included in the Citizens Research Council’s analysis.

Michigan schools might be particularly hard-pressed to find funding to keep buildings from falling apart. Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan and part of a group advocating for stronger school funding measures in the state, said Michigan is one of only a few states in the nation that do not specifically allocate money for facilities on a statewide level. The state in its most recent budget created a fund partially dedicated to infrastructure, with $250 million for buildings. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also recommended $500 million for the next budget to go to infrastructure.

“Michigan probably has a much more rapidly aging school infrastructure than a lot of other states do,” he said, “because Michigan is also one of the handful of states that doesn’t really have any sort of statewide infrastructure spending for schools.”

Schools close because of building problems

Lawmakers in June 2022 assigned $20 million to go to an audit of school facilities in the state. McCann said such a study has never been conducted before.

But anecdotal evidence suggests many Michigan school buildings in low-income areas are in disrepair or facing major problems:

Flint Schools closed for several days in summer 2021 due to a lack of air conditioning in certain buildings.
Dearborn Schools canceled class when temperatures soared in June 2022 because some rooms in the district weren’t cooled.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found that half of the districts it studied across the nation needed multiple systems, such as the HVAC system, replaced. GAO officials visited a school building in Michigan that still relied on a boiler from the 1920s for heat.
The photos in the GAO report included one of water damage in a Michigan school library and another of signage warning of asbestos.
In 2016, a series of protests led by Detroit public schools educators raised, among other issues, crumbling conditions in the district’s school buildings. Teachers described mold issues, leaky ceilings, and pest infestations.

In May 2022, the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s board approved a $700 million facilities plan to address longstanding needs. The plan involves rebuilding five buildings and renovating 64, focusing on roofing, heating and cooling, building exteriors, and lighting.

Construction at Highview Elementary School in the Crestwood School District will add additional classrooms to address crowded classrooms.

The district will use nearly half of its COVID relief money to make the sweeping changes over the next five years.

A national analysis of spending data by the Associated Press found that school districts with the highest numbers of students living in poverty are more likely than wealthier districts to spend the relief funds on building and transportation upgrades.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director at FutureEd, an education think tank based at Georgetown University, said it makes sense that districts in low-income areas are directing funds to facilities after struggling for so long.

“It also reflects that a lot of these poor districts, with years and years of disinvestment, of underinvestment — that they haven’t been able to make these repairs,” she said. “This is an opportunity with a lot of cash and a lot of cash they have to spend quickly.”

In Michigan, that means districts like Walton’s are turning to federal relief funds to address critical building issues. Nearly 54% of students in Harrison Community Schools are economically disadvantaged, defined by eligibility in the free or reduced price lunch program.

The Harrison district is spending $3.15 million to install air conditioning where the district doesn’t have it, and to replace old furnaces and air-handling units. Bond money approved by the community in past elections has helped facilities, Walton said, but ultimately, property values in the area weren’t high enough to cover HVAC repairs and replacements.

“You can only get so much through a bond, and at some point, the balance of the percentage of home value isn’t going to support the numbers you need,” she said.

Michigan’s school funding formula does not allocate specific sustained funding for buildings or facilities, which means schools without bond or other supplemental funding often struggle to find room in the budget to replace failing boilers or fix what’s broken. The most recent state budget did allocate some funds, $250 million, for school facilities, though the money hinges on a statewide facilities audit that has not yet been conducted. It’s also unclear whether the fund is ongoing or one-time.

Building improvements pay off later

Essexville-Hampton Public Schools near Bay City will use $1 million in COVID relief funds to help fund a nearly $5 million energy efficiency project in its buildings, Superintendent Justin Ralston said. The district was able to pay for the rest of the project with bond money, but the COVID relief funds helped bring the project to fruition.

More efficient buildings will save money in the long run.

“Everybody is strapped for cash,” Ralston said. So the energy efficiency project “is looking at adding new heating boilers, new rooftop units, chillers, and then also doing water conservation efforts in all of our buildings.”

In Crestwood, Mosallam, the superintendent, said district leaders focused on areas that most needed improvement, finding class sizes and school security to be priority areas. To lower class sizes, Crestwood needed more classrooms. And to ease security concerns, the district needed to add cameras and door lockdown systems, and upgrade fire systems.

While many districts are focusing on necessities, research indicates that higher quality school facilities help students learn. When they feel safe and in a nurturing environment, they’re more likely to engage with education.

Olivia Graf Doyle, design principal for Architecture for Education, a California-based firm dedicated to learning environments, said funding ideal learning environments in public schools has always been difficult, because schools often struggle to receive funding for even the necessities, such as keeping heating and cooling systems running or fixing bona fide safety hazards like crumbling ceilings.

Features like big glass windows or folding walls that seamlessly connect classrooms or enhanced outdoor spaces end up feeling like luxuries, she said.

“We really need to shift the conversation away from physical security and barriers, to really how we can use the learning environment to create a sense of belonging, which inherently builds safety,” she said.

Jordan said a lot of focus in media coverage around this spending has gone to new athletic fields or other projects that may seem more frivolous. But projects like that are rare, she said, according to her organization’s research. Instead, Jordan said districts nationwide are taking care of the necessities.

One school superintendent from a rural area of the country told Jordan that in an effort to replace a school’s roof, an inspection found the entire school needed to be condemned.

“Now there’s a lot of pushback like, ‘This is money that’s supposed to be emergency money or learning loss. Why is it going to facilities?’ And that’s a legitimate point,” she said. “But at the same token, you can’t really divorce facilities from learning. If kids are too hot or too cold, if there’s mold in the building, you get a lot of absenteeism. It’s harder to learn.”

Editor’s note: This story has been edited to add details around the state’s school consolidation and infrastructure fund.

Lily Altavena is an education reporter for the Detroit Free Press. You can reach Lily at laltavena@freepress.com.

Detroit school district is pressed for answers on how impending budget cuts will affect staffing

2023-03-24T21:50:05+00:00

Community members and union leaders are asking the Detroit school district for more clarity on how impending budget cuts will affect certain categories of district employees, as officials prepare for the end of federal COVID relief money.

Over 100 district positions may be cut or consolidated moving into the 2023-24 school year, including school support staff such as general ed kindergarten paraprofessionals, school culture facilitators, attendance agents, and college transition advisers. At a meeting of the school board finance committee Friday, the community groups pressed the district to prioritize student and family needs as it decides where to make cuts.

“We know that a lot of our paraprofessionals are really important for student relationships,” said Molly Sweeney, director of organizing for education advocacy group 482Forward. “So as we think about the budget process, if there are staff cuts, we want to be able to really justify that for what that impact is in our families and really stand with the community members.”

The Detroit Public Schools Community District received a total $1.3 billion in federal aid to help students recover from the pandemic. DPSCD will have spent most of the money by the end of this school year on initiatives such placing nurses in every school, increasing mental health resources and staff support, creating and expanding the DPSCD Virtual School, and after-school and summer school programming. And it has already committed $700 million to renovate and rebuild schools across the city.

The depletion of those funds will force the district to make some tough spending decisions for the coming year, because one of its main remaining sources of revenue is state aid based on enrollment. And DPSCD has seen its enrollment drop by about 2,000 students since the start of the public health crisis in 2020.

Discussions about next year’s budget are still ongoing, and the budget will not be finalized until board approval in June. But district officials are hoping to soften the impact of expected cuts on district employees and families by moving employees in positions that are expected to be phased out into roles with staffing shortages, such as pre-kindergarten paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, cafeteria aides, and academic interventionists.

“We want them to stay with us but move to another area,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.

Principals across the district have received their proposed budgets and are working on determining their priorities.

Part of the discussion about staff reductions, Vitti added, has been to ensure equitable funding across the district, particularly for neighborhood high schools and large K-8 schools — schools that typically have higher rates of student absenteeism and lower achievement metrics. Those schools, he noted, will have “more flexibility this year with deciding what positions they want in their building.”

After spring break next week, Vitti said, the district intends to host engagement sessions for district employees and community members to go into “greater depth and talk about the recommended changes as we go into the budget adoption in June.”

One category of employees that will see adjustments from new district priorities is attendance agents, the employees assigned to help school administrators track down absent students and get them to class.

As many as 20 attendance agent positions may be cut from the district’s budget, according to Vitti, as the district retools its strategy to address chronic student absenteeism.

In the latest school year, 77% of DPSCD students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, or 18 days.

Attendance agents have been a key part of the district’s strategy to address the problem. The district currently employs roughly 89 attendance agents, assigned to individual schools across the city. But last fall, district officials began to reconsider their allocation of one attendance agent per school.

In the future, Vitti said, the district wants to prioritize its placement of attendance agents at schools with the highest number of chronically absent students. Another group of about 20 agents would operate districtwide to support schools with less absenteeism.

As with the other positions designated for cuts, current attendance agents will be able to transition into other high-need staff roles, Vitti said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring isn’t reaching most students. Here’s how to vastly expand it.

2023-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

Tutoring was supposed to be schools’ secret weapon — a way to reverse pandemic learning loss before students fell even further behind.

But three years after COVID closed schools, and with the deadline to spend pandemic recovery funds fast approaching, many students still aren’t getting the help they need. By some estimates, just 1 in 10 students — or fewer — are receiving intensive tutoring.

The good news? Experts say it’s still possible to drastically expand tutoring. Millions more students can get the help they need, the experts said, if leaders are willing to do what it takes.

“There is an enormous need right now,” said Naeha Dean, chief strategy officer of Accelerate, a nonprofit that funds research on effective tutoring. “We really can’t wait.”

Chalkbeat asked a dozen experts how to ramp up effective tutoring. Here’s what they said:

Schedule tutoring during the school day

Most schools say they offer tutoring, yet few students actually receive it. Why?

One big reason is that tutoring is often held after school, which all but ensures low participation. Families must consent to after-hours tutoring and figure out transportation, and students must show up. Each step shrinks the pool of participants.

During-school tutoring side steps those challenges, allowing most students to attend. Students also tend to take tutoring more seriously during school than after, when programs often feature snacks and playtime alongside academics.

Most importantly, tutoring during school is more effective. A 2020 research review found that the academic impact of tutoring during school is roughly twice as large as tutoring after school.

“The science tells us that students are much more tuned in, plugged in, not fatigued, ready to engage, during the school day,” said Jen Mendelsohn, co-founder of Braintrust, which runs school tutoring programs.

It can be tough to squeeze tutoring into the school day, but experts say it’s possible by repurposing existing class periods or creating new ones. For example, the charter school organization Uncommon Schools shaved a few minutes off each period, freeing up 30-40 minutes each day for teachers to tutor small groups.

After-school tutoring just isn’t feasible for some families, said Juliana Worrell, Uncommon’s K-8 chief of schools. “So what we have concentrated on is incorporating tutoring into our actual school day.”

Turn school staffers into tutors

Many school leaders say they can’t find or afford enough tutors. Luckily, one solution is already in the building.

Nationwide, schools employ more than 880,000 paraprofessionals, or classroom aides, who assist teachers and support students with disabilities. That’s more than the number of principals, guidance counselors, and school librarians combined.

Often overlooked and underutilized, paraprofessionals can make great tutors, experts say. First, they are more racially diverse than teachers, which can benefit students. Second, they are already district employees, saving schools the time and cost of hiring outside tutors. Most importantly, they’re effective.

Tutoring studies have consistently found that paraprofessionals are second only to teachers in their ability to boost student learning. (The studies also count aspiring teachers as paraprofessionals.)

With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.

If principals are eager to use classroom aides as tutors but not sure how, they can turn to companies like Once. The firm, which works with schools in about 10 states, provides training and a curriculum to help school support staff teach reading to kindergartners. The daily tutoring sessions are then recorded so Once coaches can review the footage with tutors and offer feedback.

The service is much less costly than hiring additional tutors, said Once CEO Matt Pasternack. And it has the added benefit of putting some paraprofessionals on the path to becoming teachers.

“By the end of one year with us, they’ve gotten 20 hours of coaching in the science of reading,” he said. “There’s a lot more to learn before becoming a classroom teacher, but it’s a great foundation.”

Tap other talent pools for tutors

Schools can also find an ample supply of would-be tutors outside their walls.

One natural talent pool is the country’s estimated 600,000 aspiring teachers. Before they begin student teaching, educators-in-training often spend extensive time observing K-12 classrooms. But some teacher training programs have started using that time for tutoring, which lets aspiring teachers gain experience while assisting students.

“Research is clear that practice matters for aspiring teachers,” said Patrick Steck, senior policy director at Deans for Impact, a nonprofit working to deploy more student teachers as tutors.

Local officials are finding solutions to the inevitable logistical challenges, Steck added. For example, some teaching programs have rescheduled classes to not conflict with tutoring, while some cities and school districts cover tutors’ transportation costs.

Other college students can also make great tutors, though making that happen can be a burden for schools. Several states have stepped in to help, launching programs that recruit, train, and pay college students to work as tutors. For example, California’s new College Corps fellowship is paying college students $10,000 to tutor K-12 students this school year. Interest was high, with about three undergraduates applying for every fellowship slot, according to the state.

Parents and caregivers are another source of tutoring talent. The parent-led nonprofit Oakland REACH shows how that can work. The group recruited parents during school dropoff and pickup, then paid them a stipend to attend a six-week training on how to teach reading. The parents, whom the group calls Literacy Liberators, are now district employees earning pay and benefits to tutor students during school.

“It starts with changing your mindset about how you see our communities,” said Oakland REACH CEO Lakisha Young. “We see our parents are very powerful — we see them as the change agents.”

Use virtual tutoring wisely

Virtual tutoring can be a godsend for schools. It lets harried administrators outsource the heavy lifting and, in theory at least, allows students to get help even from home.

But there’s a big problem with virtual tutoring: Many students never use it.

One of the most popular services, Paper, lets students chat with tutors by text message 24/7. But in several school districts, only a tiny fraction of the students who have access to the service use it. And struggling students who most need help are often the least likely to log on.

Programs where students and tutors meet by video after school have also struggled with attendance. For example, in Indianapolis, only about 1 in 3 students who signed up for after-school virtual tutoring attended more than one session, officials said.

But the good news is that virtual tutoring — when done right — can be highly effective, said Loeb, the education professor who has studied online tutoring.

“Some virtual programs show dramatic effects for students,” she said in an email.

The programs work best during the school day, with adults in the classroom supervising as students work with their virtual tutors, Loeb said. Students should attend several tutoring sessions each week, and tutors should receive coaching and high-quality materials.

“What makes a good virtual tutoring program,” Loeb said, “is very much the same as what makes a good in-person tutoring program.”

States and feds must step up

Creating large-scale tutoring programs is costly and complicated — and probably not the best use of superintendents’ time.

“You can’t just leave it up to 13,000 school districts to figure out,” said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor. “State and federal governments have to get more involved.”

There are several ways to do that, experts say.

States can vet tutoring providers, develop clear guidelines, and help with tutor recruitment. Sixteen states have gone even further and established their own tutoring programs, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The Biden administration launched a public-private partnership that promotes effective tutoring practices and provides technical assistance to districts. But experts say the federal government could do more to incentivize schools to offer tutoring and remove roadblocks. For example, federal work study rules could be expanded so more college students and aspiring teachers are paid for tutoring, according to a new Deans for Impact report.

Whatever officials do, they must move quickly, tutoring proponents say.

“Students are still in school and they are not receiving the betterment they’re entitled to,” said Mendelsohn, the tutoring provider. “This is their fundamental right.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Online tutoring company Paper loses statewide contract in New Mexico

2023-03-17T17:45:27+00:00

In a swift reversal, New Mexico will no longer offer students virtual tutoring through Paper after state education officials said the company had failed to get enough students the academic help they needed.

New Mexico hired Paper last fall to provide on-demand virtual tutoring to students who attend high-poverty elementary and middle schools across the state. But Chalkbeat has learned that top officials at the Public Education Department, or PED, canceled the state’s contract after just three months, citing issues with how quickly Paper was able to enroll students in tutoring and how often students used those services.

“It is clear to the PED that this service is not providing the results in terms of engagement, support, or delivery of service to the State’s students,” New Mexico’s then-interim secretary of education, Mariana Padilla, wrote to Paper in a Feb. 20 letter terminating the state’s contract.

It’s unclear how many students Paper enrolled in tutoring, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

New Mexico plans to replace the company with in-person tutoring, but has yet to get that up and running — leaving many students with a gap in support at a critical time for academic recovery. The about-face marks one of the highest-profile examples yet of a retreat from on-demand virtual tutoring, a model that exploded in popularity during the pandemic as schools found it challenging to staff and schedule tutoring sessions in person.

Paper, in particular, became a go-to provider for many of the nation’s largest school districts, including in Los Angeles, Boston, and the Las Vegas area, as well as the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. But reporting by Chalkbeat and other news outlets has raised questions about the utility of Paper’s virtual tutoring — which is primarily conducted over text-based chat and does not include video or live audio — especially for younger children, English language learners, and struggling readers.

In earlier interviews with Chalkbeat, Paper’s CEO Philip Cutler said his company was aware of some districts’ concerns and had stepped up outreach and added ways for students to communicate with tutors. Paper’s promise, he argued, remained its ability to serve large numbers of students.

New Mexico’s decision suggests that hadn’t yet happened. Allison Socol, a vice president at The Education Trust, an education civil rights group, said it’s commendable that officials made a change if they realized the on-demand virtual help wasn’t working.

“That doesn’t always happen,” Socol said. “This is a good moment to take stock of the interventions that districts and schools put in place in a moment of crisis and urgency and whether those are the right things.”

As COVID relief funds dwindle, education leaders should be looking at what’s working, Socol said, as well as “what isn’t working and what should we disinvest from so that those dollars can be allocated to things that will actually make a difference for kids.”

New Mexico signed a contract in late November with Paper worth up to $3.3 million funded by federal COVID relief funds. The state asked Paper to focus on the some 220,000 students in preschool to eighth grade who attend Title I schools, which serve higher concentrations of children from low-income families.

The contract set modest goals for the company, asking Paper to enroll at least 2,200 students in tutoring by the end of this month and to tutor at least 11,000 students by the end of the contract in September 2024. The state wanted each of those students to receive at least 20 hours of tutoring.

State officials wouldn’t say how far off Paper was from meeting those targets. A spokesperson for New Mexico’s education department, Kelly Pearce, said in a statement that the “PED’s partnership with Paper did not meet the needs of New Mexico’s students. As soon as this was determined, the contract was closed.”

It’s also unclear how much money the state spent on services it now says were inadequate. Pearce declined to answer questions about how much New Mexico has paid out to Paper. In her termination letter, Padilla indicated that Paper’s performance had been an issue since the beginning of the contract and that the state had previously expressed concerns. (Leadership at the education department had also been in flux during that period.)

Elsewhere, school leaders have had similar issues. In Hillsborough County, Florida, for example, the school district got a more than $500,000 refund from Paper after the company reached only a fraction of the students it had projected.

That hasn’t been the case everywhere, though. The Mississippi education department’s contract with Paper is still in effect and the state hasn’t had any concerns about the company’s performance, spokesperson Jean Cook said in an email.

In New Mexico, Paper beat out 17 other tutoring companies to win the state contract as part of a months-long competitive process. The state said it was open to a range of tutoring providers — including in-person, virtual, or a combination of the two — but Paper edged out its competitors in large part because it said it could do the job for the lowest price.

Some observers question why New Mexico officials thought opt-in online tutoring would be a good fit in a state where internet access has improved but is still limited, and where schools serve large shares of English learners, who often have trouble using Paper’s text-based platform.

Emily Wildau, a research and policy analyst at the nonprofit New Mexico Voices for Children, says that after chronic absenteeism shot up in the state during the pandemic, many students would benefit from more consistent tutoring that’s part of their school day.

“That kind of opt-in tutoring model is really good for the kids who are already doing pretty well,” Wildau said. “It’s not going to help the kids that are the farthest behind, who need the most attention in our state and who need to be re-engaged.”

In the meantime, students and families don’t have access to any tutoring through the state’s initiative. (Though the state continues to run a separate virtual tutoring program taught by New Mexico teachers for some 375 students in algebra I.)

In January, Lisa-Ashley Dionne signed up to get tutoring through Paper for her two daughters, who attend a Title I elementary school that was eligible for the extra help. But the service went away before her kids could use it.

Dionne wanted her fourth grader, who spent her entire second grade year online, to be able to work with a tutor on her Spanish conversation skills, since she attends a dual language school. She’s hoping Paper’s replacement will be more interactive.

“I’m just hoping for more of that conversation — just the back and forth interaction where they can engage more with the tutor,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring help reaches few students despite nationwide push

2023-03-10T11:30:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

David Daniel knows his son needs help.

The 8-year-old spent first grade in remote learning and several weeks of second grade in quarantine. The best way to catch him up, research suggests, is to tutor him several times a week during school.

But his Indianapolis school offers Saturday or after-school tutoring — programs that don’t work for Daniel, a single father. The upshot is his son, now in third grade, isn’t getting the tutoring he needs.

“I want him to have the help,” Daniel said. Without it, “next year is going to be really hard on him.”

As America’s schools confront dramatic learning setbacks caused by the pandemic, experts have held up intensive tutoring as the single best antidote. Yet even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.

In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.

A new tutoring corps in Chicago has served about 3% of students, officials said. The figure was less than 1% in three districts: Georgia’s Gwinnett County, Florida’s Miami-Dade County, and Philadelphia, where the district reported only about 800 students were tutored. In those three systems alone, there were more than 600,000 students who spent no time in a district tutoring program this fall.

The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Whatever the reason, the impact is clear: At a crucial time for students’ recovery, millions of children have not received the academic equivalent of powerful medication.

“It works, it’s effective, it gets students to improve in their learning and catch up,” said Amie Rapaport, a University of Southern California researcher who has analyzed students’ access to intensive tutoring. “So why isn’t it reaching them?”

The Indianapolis school district last year launched two tutoring programs that connect students with certified teachers over video. One is available to all students after school, while the other is offered during the day at certain low-performing schools.

District officials say a trial run boosted student test scores. Parents give it high marks.

“The progress that he made in just a couple months last semester working with his tutor was kind of far beyond what he was grasping and doing at school,” said Jessica Blalack, whose 7-year-old, Phoenix, opted in to after-school tutoring.

Jessica Blalack watches as her son Phoenix, 7, works with a tutor on his laptop in his Indianapolis home.

Still, the two programs combined served only about 3,200 students last fall, or roughly 17% of students in district-run schools. Two additional tutoring programs operate at a handful of schools.

Only 35% of the students who registered for after-school tutoring last fall attended more than one session, according to district data.

Indianapolis Public Schools spokesperson Marc Ransford said the district is working to improve attendance and hopes to enroll more students in tutoring next school year. It’s also trying to accelerate student learning in other ways, including with a new curriculum and summer school.

Shaan Akbar, co-founder of the firm Tutored by Teachers, which runs the video tutoring programs, said his team is focused on maintaining quality.

“Trying to shoot for scale quickly is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Nationwide, schools report that about 10% of students are receiving “high-dosage” tutoring multiple days a week, according to a federal survey from December. The real number could be even lower: Just 2% of U.S. households say their children are getting that kind of intensive tutoring, according to the USC analysis of a different nationally representative survey.

Schools trying to ramp up tutoring have run into roadblocks, including staffing and scheduling. Experts say tutoring is most effective when provided three times a week for at least 30 minutes during school hours. Offering after-school or weekend tutoring is simpler, but turnout is often low.

Harrison Tran, a 10th grader in Savannah, Georgia, struggled to make sense of algebra during remote learning. Last year, his high school offered after-school help. But that wasn’t feasible for Harrison, who lives 30 minutes from school and couldn’t afford to miss his ride home.

Without tutoring help, he started this school year with gaps in his learning.

“When I got into my Algebra II class, I was entirely lost,” he said.

Relatively low family interest has been another challenge. Though test scores plunged during the pandemic, many parents do not believe their children experienced learning loss, or simply are unaware. The disconnect makes it more important to offer tutoring during school, experts say.

“Parents just aren’t as concerned as we need them to be,” said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff, “if we’re going to have to rely on parents opting their kids into interventions.”

Even when students want the help, some have been let down.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County, 12th-grader Talia Bradley recently sought calculus help from a virtual tutoring company hired by the district. But the problem she was struggling with also stumped the tutor. After an hour trying to sort it out, Talia walked away frustrated.

“My daughter was no farther along,” said Leah Bradley, her mother. “Having an option for online tutoring makes sense, but it can’t be the primary option if you’re looking for good results.”

Repeated in-person tutoring tends to be more effective than on-demand online help, but it’s also harder to manage. District rules add complexity, with safeguards like tutor background checks and vendor bidding rules slowing the process.

In Wake County, North Carolina, the school district began planning a reading tutoring program last summer. The program did not launch until November, and district officials said last month that volunteers are tutoring fewer than 140 students — far fewer than the 1,000 students the program was designed to reach.

“We’re always looking to serve more students,” said Amy Mattingly, director of K-12 programs at Helps Education Fund, the nonprofit managing that program and another serving about 400 students. But, she added, it’s important to “see what’s working and make tweaks before trying to scale up and serve everyone.”

Sixteen states have established their own tutoring programs using a collective $470 million in federal COVID aid, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers. But even those statewide programs have reached a limited number of students.

Ohio awarded $14 million in grants to more than 30 colleges and universities to provide tutoring in local schools. They served just 2,000 students statewide last fall, according to a state spokesperson, who said the goal is to eventually reach 10,000 students.

Some districts defended their participation numbers, saying tutoring is most effective when well targeted.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, 3% of the district’s 90,000 students participated in tutoring programs this fall. Most of the tutoring was offered by paraprofessionals during the school day, with one hired to give intense support in each elementary school.

The district says time and staffing limits how many students can get frequent, intensive tutoring.

“We don’t want to water it down, because then you don’t get the impact that the research says is beneficial for kids,” said Cliff Jones, chief academic officer for the system.

Others worry too few are getting the help they need even as programs continue to grow.

This school year, about 3,500 students are getting reading tutoring from the North Carolina Education Corps. Meanwhile, in fourth grade alone, more than 41,000 students statewide scored in the bottom level on a national reading test last year.

“Who we are serving,” said Laura Bilbro-Berry, the program’s senior director, “is just a drop in the bucket.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Michigan’s ‘historic’ rise in education budget is tempered by inflation

2023-03-09T22:32:54+00:00

Michigan schools collecting increased state aid and federal COVID relief dollars are finding that those dollars don’t go as far as they used to.

At L’anse Creuse Public Schools, a 9,400-student district in Macomb County, expenses have spiked in virtually every area, said Superintendent Erik Edoff. Bus fuel is twice as expensive today as it was in 2020. Paper costs 24% more. Natural gas is up 80%.

To help employees keep up with rising prices for consumer goods, the district paid them unscheduled raises and bonuses.

So while Edoff is thankful that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is proposing another big funding increase for schools, he and other education leaders in the state caution that schools in Michigan still aren’t funded adequately when you account for inflation and rising student needs.

Inflation “mutes the positive impact” of the budget increases, Edoff said, “and I don’t think that’s being discussed very much.” The increases, he said, are about enough to maintain services, but don’t leave much room for improving them.

To be sure, education funding more than kept pace with inflation last year. Whitmer’s 2022-23 budget, which education leaders hailed as “generational,” provided a 16% increase in state education spending — or 7% in inflation-adjusted terms, as prices reached a 40-year high. Her budget for next year would also outpace prices.

“When Governor Whitmer described her education budget as ‘historic,’ she meant it,” Craig Thiel, research director for the Citizens Research Council, wrote in a recent blog post.

But advocates say the current pace of budget increases still isn’t enough to make up for decades of underfunding.

“The reality is, given the cost of education, there’s not enough money to do the things that we need to do,” said Molly Sweeney, organizing director for 482Forward. “COVID money is going away, we’re not keeping up with inflation, and we’re already underfunding our state as a whole.”

Inflation typically hasn’t factored into debates over Michigan’s annual education budget. For many years inflation rates were so low, that they made little appreciable difference in the impact of year-to-year funding changes.

But the pandemic and recovery period have roiled the economy. Michigan schools are getting much more funding, but part of that is going toward covering new costs for educational programs , and higher prices for basic goods and services, from fuel and food to raw materials for construction projects.

What’s more, schools face another round of fiscal reckoning once federal COVID aid ends next year.

In that context, it’s hard to tell whether school districts are unusually flush with money, or unusually strapped. The truth is a bit of both. Districts have much more money to work with than they have had in a long time, but the unpredictable effects of inflation, combined with other longstanding financial pressures, make it harder to allocate those funds.

Inflation compounds funding challenges

High prices are being felt in districts statewide. Detroit Public Schools Community District recently amended its budget to reflect several million dollars in unexpected, inflation-related costs. In Dearborn, officials ruled out a tentative plan to renovate two schools, pointing to rising building costs.

In rural Michigan, where school buses travel long distances, higher fuel prices are exacerbating already high transportation costs. “We had $100,000 in our diesel budget, and we burned through that in the first third of the year this year,” said Tom McKee, superintendent of Rudyard Area Schools in the Upper Peninsula.

Districts also face funding challenges unrelated to rising prices.

Declining enrollment, a long-running phenomenon exacerbated by the pandemic, will hurt districts financially because they are funded largely on a per pupil basis.

And staffing costs are up, part of the statewide effort to help students recover academically.

Whitmer spokesperson Stacey LaRouche pointed out that the governor’s budget proposal would exceed inflation over the coming year. Whitmer is proposing an increase of 9% for education — or 4% in inflation-adjusted terms.

“Governor Whitmer has worked to reverse decades of disinvestment in our state’s K-12 schools by securing more funding in every aspect of a child’s education to ensure that they have what they need to be successful,” LaRouche said in a statement.

The largest single item in Whitmer’s schools budget, per-pupil funding to schools, would increase 5% to a minimum of $9,608. That’s slightly less than the expected rate of inflation for this year. But it’s buttressed by substantial new proposed investments in tutoring, student loan forgiveness for teachers, and other specific programs. The per pupil increases of the last two years — 5% and 7% — are the largest of the last decade.

Thiel, from the Citizens Research Council, told Chalkbeat that Whitmer’s budget proposal would bring state spending in line with inflation over the last decade.

Sweeney and other education advocates say spending should be accelerated more to make up for a history of underfunding that goes further back.

Inflation effects may linger for some districts

While prices seemingly peaked in 2022 — Michigan economists expect inflation to drop to 5.5% this year and 3% the following year — the effects of the price spike may prove particularly persistent for school districts.

Most school spending goes to educator salaries, which are often set in three-year contracts.

Kentwood Public Schools, for instance, increased salaries for first-year teachers by 5% when its current contract began in 2021. When prices spiked, the district gave another 1% raise to all employees, plus additional scheduled pay increases. Even so, the raises hardly matched inflation.

The district will face the prospect of addressing several years of inflation when the current teachers contract expires this summer.

“The greatest impact of inflation is on our staff,” said Kentwood Superintendent Kevin Polston. “Their take-home increases aren’t keeping up with inflation. We want to increase compensation, but it’s not so easy.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit district budget cuts may target school deans, assistant principals, as COVID aid dries up

2023-03-06T19:55:49+00:00

Funds for school deans, assistant principals, central office staff, and summer school programs are at risk of being cut as Detroit school district officials consider how to balance their budget when federal COVID relief money dries up.

That’s the outlook for the district based on priorities that Superintendent Nikolai Vitti outlined during a school board finance committee meeting Friday morning. The priorities reflected discussions the full board held during an hours-long closed-door meeting on Feb. 18.

“Based on the board retreat, the priorities moving forward with available funds are contracted nurses, full time social workers, and academic interventionists,” Vitti said Friday.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District received a total $1.3 billion in federal aid that was designed to help students recover from the pandemic. The loss of that funding will hit the district hard, because one of its main remaining sources of revenue is state aid based on enrollment. And DPSCD has seen its enrollment drop by about 2,000 students since the start of the public health crisis.

DPSCD will have spent most of the federal money by the end of this school year on initiatives such placing nurses in every school, increasing mental health resources and staff support, creating and expanding the DPSCD Virtual School, and after-school and summer school programming. And it has already committed $700 million to renovate and rebuild schools across the city.

As many as 100 staff members have already been told their positions, paid for in part using federal COVID aid, may be cut or consolidated by the end of the school year.

After this year, the funding cuts will hit “school based administrators, deans, assistant principals and central office administrators,” Vitti said. However, he noted that individual principals could tap their discretionary budgets to cover some of these positions.

Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said the effects of dwindling COVID relief dollars will come up in contract negotiations for all of the unions connected to the district.

“As we build momentum in our contract talks, we understand that there will be some shifts made due to the loss of COVID funding,” Wilson-Lumpkins said. “Our concern as the union is how to maintain all of our members, because the services are still needed.”

“We don’t want to put our members, and our students most importantly, in a situation where there have been deep cuts unnecessarily or prematurely,” she said.

Parent liaisons should be here to stay

Detroit schools will have access to federal funding through Title I, a program that provides additional money for schools with high numbers or high percentages of low-income students.

Vitti said individual schools will have to rely on Title I dollars to fund parent liaison positions next school year.

Parent liaisons, or parent outreach coordinators, have been key to the district’s efforts to connect with and engage parents and families across the city. Hired as part time staff, these parents typically work with school staff to run parent programs and workshops, promote school-sponsored events, advertise parent-teacher conferences, and coordinate home visits for administrators.

During the pandemic, the district used some of its COVID dollars to pay district staff and parents to canvas neighborhoods as it prepared to return fully to in-person learning in the 2021-22 school year.

“There’ll be some dollars” for the neighborhood canvassing, Vitti said, “but not as much when we think about one-time COVID money. But the parent liaisons will be funded in individual schools.”

Detroit’s robust summer school may see drastic cuts

The Detroit district’s ambitious summer school offerings will likely see drastic reductions going into the summer. Vitti said the district intends to limit its program to students in grades 8 through 12 who need to complete credit recovery courses for core subjects such as English, math, science and social studies.

Over the past two years, DPSCD’s Summer Learning Experiences has offered a wide range of programs, from academic enrichment classes and STEM courses to recreational activities for students, funded with COVID relief aid.

DPSCD spent $10 million to expand Summer Learning Experiences in 2021 and $11 million to expand the program this past summer, bringing summer school enrollment to roughly 8,000 students. The program was recognized last year by U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and first lady Jill Biden during a special visit at Detroit’s Schulze Academy for Technology and Arts.

This year, Vitti said, the district plans to offer summer school at five city high schools, and provide transportation. Individual high schools may offer bridge programs for eighth graders transitioning into ninth grade, but funding for those initiatives will have to come from individual school budgets.

Academic intervention reform remains a budget priority

The district has counted on academic interventionists for its larger reform efforts to provide intensive academic support for students performing below grade level in core subjects. Funding for these educators won’t go away.

Last fall, the district received a $20 million private donation from billionaire MacKenzie Scott. At the time, Vitti said the district planned to use that money to hire academic interventionists, and on Friday he said the district hopes to employ as many as 50 academic interventionists to work one-on-one or in small groups with students.

Those positions, according to Vitti, would primarily be located at specific K-8 schools that are large and “have more students … below grade level.”

Schools outside of those parameters, such as smaller K-5 and K-8 schools, will see a slight increase in their academic interventionist budget allocation. The overall number of academic interventionists at each of those schools, Vitti added, will depend on how many students are in each grade.

Warren Township district seeks tax increase to cover initiatives once federal COVID aid expires

2023-02-23T19:29:28+00:00

Tabitha Jackson couldn’t have arrived at Eastridge Elementary at a more crucial time.

The pandemic wreaked havoc on learning, and the return to in-person classes proved tough. Her position as a family engagement liaison, funded through federal coronavirus relief dollars, had one major goal: Get families back to school.

Since 2021, Jackson has helped parents find rental assistance, directed families to childcare providers, and visited the homes of students who are chronically absent. Today, Principal Tomeka Johnson doesn’t know how she ever ran the school without her. Attendance has ticked up from last year, she said, and the school has earned back trust from parents.

“She’s able to provide those resources and take some of that load off of parents,” Johnson said. “It really helps parents get kids to school.”

But the roughly $45 million that the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township received in federal coronavirus relief funds — money that supports jobs like Jackson’s — will run out relatively soon.

Now, the Warren Township district is asking voters for an $88 million property tax increase over eight years, in part to maintain the support it received from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding that the state says must be spent by the end of 2024.

The district is far from alone: From Michigan to New York City and beyond, the upcoming expiration of federal COVID aid is a challenge facing many school leaders. After districts accelerated their spending of that money last year, they must figure out whether — and how — to preserve jobs like Jackson’s after the money runs out.

The ballot question the Warren Township district will place before voters in May would replace the current 2018 referendum rate for operating expenses, increasing it from 21 cents per $100 of assessed property value to 30 cents.

Officials estimate the new tax rate would generate roughly $11 million annually over eight years. It would fund a few of the programs launched during the pandemic.

But the ballot question also seeks to continue funding positions currently covered by the 2018 tax increase (which is set to expire in 2026), including $1.6 million for a district police department and $2.1 million for 24 school counselors.

Even with property values on the rise, district leaders also say additional funding is needed to keep up with increasing costs of everything from diesel fuel to property insurance.

“It’s just simply more expensive to run a school district in 2023 than it was in 2018,” said Matthew Parkinson, the district’s chief financial officer.

Superintendent Tim Hanson stressed his district isn’t looking to pay for new programs, but simply maintain all of the district’s current efforts.

“And in order to do that, we need this referendum passed,” he said.

Referendum would continue ESSER-funded efforts

Warren Township’s pitch to voters covers a wide variety of efforts supported by federal pandemic dollars, from helping students get to school to competitive support staff pay.

In an attempt to battle a bus driver shortage that’s plagued many districts during COVID, for example, the district increased the starting salary for its bus drivers this fall by $4 an hour to roughly $22.50.

Keeping bus driver pay competitive is part of an estimated total $3 million in annual transportation costs to be covered by the referendum. Warren Township’s pay hike hasn’t entirely solved the problem: As of early February, Warren still had 20 vacancies out of 115 full-time positions.

Professional development, support staff compensation, and family engagement liaisons make up another annual $2.8 million that officials hope to keep in their annual budget.

The district used federal dollars to provide stipends for teachers to participate in training programs, including one on the science of reading.

And after completing a market analysis of hourly support staff pay, the district also used about $3.5 million in ESSER funds to increase compensation for its roughly 750 full-time support staff.

The analysis found that $15 per hour was the threshold for remaining competitive in hiring employees such as custodians, secretaries, and instructional assistants, Hanson said.

“We have provided an additional hourly stipend to meet or exceed that $15 threshold,” he said. “It’s our hope with the passing of the referendum that we would be able to maintain a competitive level.”

Another annual $1.5 million will cover the cost of technology such as iPads and Chromebooks.

While the district adopted 1-to-1 devices for every student before the pandemic, it also used ESSER relief funds to purchase devices, since some were lost by students when they were sent home over the pandemic, officials said.

The new referendum funding will cover the annual cost of recycling or replacing those devices, according to the district.

At Eastridge Elementary, where roughly 76% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the pandemic has led some parents to declare bankruptcy. Others have lost jobs or been pushed to the brink of eviction.

Through it all, Jackson has tried to connect them to resources.

“This year, now that I’ve built those relationships, I’m really able to have those in-depth conversations about attendance and really hone in on: ‘Why are you not able to get your kid here? How can I help?’” she said. “That trust has been built.”

Pre-pandemic support for counselors pays dividends

The referendum will also continue services adopted before the pandemic that have since become even more vital.

Kristen Linenberg joined Warren Central High School as a counselor in 2018 with a caseload of 500 students — twice the size recommended by the American School Counselor Association.

That meant 500 seniors with a medley of academic and personal challenges that Linenberg tried to address as she worked to get them to graduate.

“We were very reactive, because that’s truly what we had time to do,’ she said. “And it was just, whatever happened that day, that’s kind of what you dealt with.”

Warren Central High School has a large population of over 3,400 students. The operating referendum on the May ballot will help continue funding for counselors at the school that began before the pandemic.

The initial funding from the 2018 referendum provided 12 counselors in middle schools and eight at the high school. The starting salary for those with a master’s degree is $48,000.

But after the pandemic, the district added four more counselors at the high school to relieve Linenberg and others. That move was made possible by increased property values that generated more referendum revenue than projected in 2018.

Now, Linenberg’s caseload has dropped to roughly 300 students, allowing her to spend more one-on-one time with students. That’s especially helpful as the need for counseling services has increased in COVID’s wake.

“Not every student needs crazy intensive therapy and counseling. Sometimes they just need a safe place to vent about a bad day,” she said. “And so us having more counselors and a smaller caseload allows us to have the time to do that.”

District officials are cautiously optimistic that voters will support the tax increase. In 2018, 65% of voters backed the new tax rate.

Johnson, Eastridge Elementary’s principal, didn’t realize how many needs her students had until she actually got the funding for staff such as liaisons and counselors. The upcoming referendum is not about money, she argued, but about need.

“This is our community and we have to invest in it because if we don’t, then who will?” she said. “Our role is to raise and grow children, and they need us.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

2023-02-17T18:00:00+00:00

For the past couple of years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been able to tap its share of federal COVID relief aid to fund after-school enrichment programs that help students recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

But those funds will soon run out, and Detroit and other districts face some tough decisions about which programs and employees they can afford to keep once federal support is gone.

Detroit parent Aliya Moore said she is concerned that her daughter’s newly funded after-school debate team will be “snatched,” along with funding for new positions such as parent outreach coordinators.

“That’s my biggest fear,” said Moore, who is a frequent critic of the district. “Just going into (next) school year, and a lot of these people are not there.”

For districts, there’s an added challenge: Looming deadlines attached to the federal aid put them under time pressure to map out their spending and use up the remaining funds quickly and effectively, while also figuring out how they’ll manage without it.

What they’re eager to prevent is a so-called fiscal cliff, where a steep drop in funding forces sudden and severe budget cuts that could ripple throughout the school system.

Superintendents in Michigan are generally optimistic that their districts can avoid that scenario, especially given the prospect of increased state funding. But experts say it will take work.

“Districts need to plan now, so students don’t face chaos at the start of the 2024 school year with classrooms and teachers shuffled, programs abruptly dropped, demoralized staff, and leaders focusing on nothing but budget woes,” wrote Marguerite Roza, a professor at Georgetown University who studies school finance, in a recent article.

What is federal COVID aid?

Michigan hasn’t seen anything like this: more than $6 billion in federal funds aimed at helping students recover from the pandemic, by far the largest one-time federal investment in schools in state history. Most of it was distributed based on poverty levels in each district’s community. The Detroit district alone received $1.27 billion.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Congress gave districts plenty of leeway on how they could spend the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money, or ESSER funds. So far, they have used it for a wide array of projects, including summer school expansions, staff bonuses, air filtration improvements, building renovations, tutoring, and mental health programs.

But they’re on a tight schedule to spend it. The federal government wants the funds deployed quickly to accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. So districts have only until 2024 to get state approval for all their spending plans. Much of the spending itself must be complete by 2025, though districts may apply for extensions through 2026.

Districts aim to reduce spending without affecting the classroom

Having such a massive spending initiative roll out — and wrap up — so quickly was never going to be easy for Michigan districts. The state’s highest-poverty districts, which received by far the most funding per student, are taking the longest to spend the funds amid supply chain disruptions and a tight labor market.

Even districts that budgeted carefully and avoided long-term spending commitments that couldn’t be sustained without federal support will see disruptions from the loss of short-term programming that has been critical to the COVID recovery effort.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District, for instance, has notified as many as 100 staff members, including central office staff, master teachers, deans of culture, and attendance agents, that their positions paid for in part using federal COVID aid may be cut or consolidated by the end of the school year.

Neighboring Ecorse Public Schools will end a tutoring program designed to help students manage the effects of the pandemic.

DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district isn’t planning to make budget recommendations that would hurt student achievement. “However, at a high level, if hard decisions are not made, then we will not be able to fund some of the COVID initiatives that we believe are most important to students,” he said.

Detroit has moved relatively quickly to plan out and spend its COVID aid. Of the $1.27 billion DPSCD received, $700 million is already earmarked for an infrastructure program that will renovate and rebuild schools across the city. The rest has gone toward expanding programming and providing additional staff at individual schools, among other things.

Vitti said that although no decision has been made yet, “it will be difficult to fund nurses and expand after-school programming and summer school next year.”

The DPSCD school board will convene on Saturday for a retreat and its first in-depth conversation about the expiring funds. Board members have insisted that district leaders find a way to maintain expanded mental health programming, even if it was funded by COVID aid.

Moore, whose daughter is a seventh-grader at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy, plans to attend Saturday’s meeting to hear what COVID-funded initiatives board members intend to keep or cut. With pandemic recovery far from complete, she’s hoping the board will prioritize after-school programming and academic recovery programs moving into the 2023-24 school year.

“I don’t feel like at this time any school should be denied after-school opportunities,” she said.

Some districts have huge sums left to spend

For other districts, it’s the federal deadlines that are proving to be the bigger challenge.

The issue came into sharp relief last year when hundreds of superintendents nationwide asked the U.S. Department of Education to extend the deadlines, saying that supply chain and staffing problems were slowing spending. The department said no, barring a change to federal law. (In Virginia, lawmakers are seeking to ratchet up the pressure with a bill that would require districts to return unspent funding to the state this summer.)

In Michigan, some observers have argued that state lawmakers should withhold new investments from districts that still have enormous amounts of federal funding to spend.

As of January, Michigan districts had spent 30% of the third and largest round of federal funding. They still have $2.1 billion to spend — which is equivalent to 10% of all state education spending this year.

Detroit has spent 38% of its federal funds, but other districts that received very high levels of federal aid — roughly defined as more than $10,000 per pupil — have much more ground to make up.

Flint Community Schools has spent 12% of the third wave of COVID funds. Hamtramck Public Schools spent 14%, Eastpointe Community Schools spent 5%, and Pontiac City School District spent 7%.

Benton Harbor Area Schools hasn’t spent any of its funds.

A recent report from the Citizens Research Council, a Michigan think tank, linked the vast majority of the unspent funds to a handful of high-poverty communities.

The report warns that rapid spending won’t be easy given the staff shortages and supply chain problems that have plagued the pandemic-era economy.

It notes, too, that spending the money effectively will be even tougher on a tight timeline.

Flint Superintendent Kevelin Jones said his district will be able to spend the money on time, and that it has emphasized one-time investments to make it easier to manage the end of COVID funding. In 2021, the district used federal funds to pay teachers one-time bonuses of $22,500.

“From the beginning, the district understood that ESSER funds served as a one-time” funding source, he said in a statement, noting that the goal of its spending was still to create a lasting impact.

Strong state budget provides a backstop

The closest parallel to the challenges facing Michigan schools may be the 2011 expiration of federal funds linked to the Great Recession.

Many districts used those dollars to build new programs, hoping that the state would step in to continue them when federal dollars dried up. Instead, amid a disastrous economy, state leaders opted for a steep cut to school funding, leading to a brutal round of cutbacks in school programming.

Things look different this time around. The state budget is far stronger, bolstered by historically high sales tax revenues. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s recent budget proposal taps an estimated $4 billion school aid surplus to call for a second straight major increase in school funding. Democrats, fully empowered in Lansing for the first time in decades, say they are eager to support increased school spending.

While the federal COVID aid program is much larger than the Great Recession package was, experts say the boost in state funding this time will do much to smooth the transition away from pandemic-related funding and ease the risk of a fiscal cliff.

Westwood Community School District, set in a high-poverty suburb west of Detroit, avoided using COVID aid to pay salaries or hire staff. Superintendent Stiles Simmons said the district used the money instead to pay $1,000 bonuses to classroom aides and improve facilities. When it needed new staff to help students cope with the pandemic, it relied on new state funding to cover salaries.

When the funds expire, aides might miss their bonuses, Simmons said, and the district won’t be able to continue paying educators $60 an hour to teach summer school. But he said he’s more worried about the possibility of a recession or a change in political support for schools than the expiration of COVID funds.

“If things continue as they are at this point, it’s difficult to see the cliff, but just knowing how things ebb and flow … especially with the economy, we have to always be on the lookout,” he said.

Even with rising state funding, DPSCD school board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo said the coming budget adjustments for school districts warrant a reconsideration of the way Michigan funds schools, calling the current formula inequitable. Since the passage of Proposal A in 1994, Michigan school funding has been based on the number of students attending the district. In Detroit, a series of economic downturns and a decline in the city’s population eroded student enrollment.

“Now’s the time, because we have a Democratic majority, to revisit Proposal A,” Gay-Dagnogo said. “We’re not talking about taking away funds from other districts. We’re talking about equalizing the dollars.”

She added: “You can’t plug in short term money for long term positions in perpetuity, but we have to have a solution for how to make sure that we are not displacing (staff) that really care and want to serve our children properly.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee is talking about rejecting federal education funding. What would that mean for kids?

2023-02-16T11:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free Tennessee newsletter to keep up with the Shelby County public school system and state education policy.

When House Speaker Cameron Sexton recently floated the idea of Tennessee rejecting U.S. education dollars to free its schools from federal rules and restrictions, he made the pivot sound as simple as making up the difference with $1.8 billion in state funds.

“I don’t think the legislation would be too hard to do,” he said last week after publicly declaring his desire to “do things the Tennessee way” at a Tennessee Farm Bureau reception on Feb. 7.

But the way federal funding works is pretty complex. Some districts and schools are more dependent than others on that money, which is directed to schools that serve disadvantaged students and programs that target certain needs ranging from rural education and English language learners to technology and charter schools. A related web of state and federal laws and policies created in response to the federal grants also likely would have to be unwound.

Sexton told Chalkbeat he’s working on legislation to “start a conversation” about the possibilities. And once filed, his written proposal might answer some of the many questions that Tennesseans are asking about what such a change would mean for kids and schools.

But for now, here are a few answers, along with more questions to ponder:

Is the proposal in Tennessee serious?

While a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education dismissed Sexton’s comments as “political posturing,” the House speaker said he’s dead serious.

“I absolutely think we should do it,” Sexton told Chalkbeat.

Sexton noted that, based on the latest budget information, Tennessee could tap into $3.2 billion in new recurring revenues, which would more than cover any lost federal funds for education.

“Now is the time to look at it,” said Sexton, who as House speaker is one of the state’s most influential Republicans. “It doesn’t mean that you do it this year or you have to do it in the next six months, but it starts with the idea.”

Spokespeople for Republican Gov. Bill Lee and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally expressed openness to Sexton’s proposal, while several education leaders in Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature expressed outright enthusiasm.

“I would do everything in my power to pass that bill,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, of Culleoka, who chairs a House education subcommittee and said he “wants Tennessee to have more autonomy when it comes to educating our kids.”

“It’s intriguing,” added Rep. Debra Moody, of Covington, chair of the House Education Instruction Committee. “I think my constituents at home would love it.”

Others were more reserved in their comments.

“It’s a thought-provoking idea, but I’d like to see details,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg, of Bristol. “I have questions about what federal strings would be removed and, more importantly, do those strings need removing? Right now, I don’t know.”

Can Tennessee say ‘no’ to federal money?

Probably. No state has rejected the funding so far, mainly because states typically need the money, which on average makes up about a tenth of their budgets for K-12 education.

But Republican leaders in other states have talked about the idea before, and Oklahoma lawmakers are currently considering legislation to phase out federal funding over 10 years for pre-K through 12th grade. A smattering of small school systems across the nation already have passed on federal money because of the cost of compliance.

“States do not have to accept federal funding at first glance,” said Matthew Patrick Shaw, assistant professor of law, public policy and education at Vanderbilt University. “These are carrot-stick programs in which the federal government has policy objectives and, in order to encourage states to go along with them, offers money that they believe states need to operate these programs.”

Would the change disrupt finances for students and schools across Tennessee?

Possibly, but a lot would depend on how it’s done.

Through a program known as Title I, the federal government distributes hundreds of millions of federal dollars to Tennessee schools that serve large concentrations of students from low-income homes to help improve achievement. If Tennessee replaced Title I funding with state money, would it still use the federal formula for distributing that money? Sexton hasn’t said.

The same question applies to federal funds that go to Title III programs to support English language learners, or for Title V programs to support rural education.

Sexton says Tennessee would still cover the costs of all of those programs, as well as free meals funded through assorted grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, where all but eight of the system’s 155 district-run schools have Title I designations, some officials aren’t convinced about the stability of state funding.

“If Tennessee decided to do it our way, what does ‘our way’ look like?” asked school board member Amber Huett-Garcia, whose district expects to receive more than $892 million in federal funding next year.

“Would it achieve equity? Would Memphis continue to receive the share that it currently gets?” she continued.

What federal strings does Sexton want to cut?

Testing is the main problem, according to Sexton.

“I don’t think the TCAP test measures much of anything, and I think teachers would tell you that you’re teaching to a test,” said Sexton about the state’s annual test under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

States that take federal money must give annual assessments in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. They also are required to administer a science test one time each in elementary, middle and high school grades. Thus, each state must give 17 tests annually, though no individual student takes more than three of those tests in a given school year.

Sexton said Tennessee could scrap TCAP — which Tennessee developed through its testing companies to align with the state’s academic standards — and create a better test with the help of its educators.

But several education advocates note that states already have more flexibility than ever to develop their testing, evaluation, and accountability systems under a 2015 federal law crafted with the leadership of former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“When shepherding the Every Student Succeeds Act, Sen. Alexander was laser-focused on Tennessee and what Tennessee would need to be successful,” said Sasha Pudelski, national advocacy director for the School Superintendents Association.

States receiving Title I funds also must participate in national tests of fourth- and eighth-grade students in reading and math every two years. Known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress allows comparisons across states and is an important marker for showing how students are doing over time.

Lundberg, a key education leader in the Senate, said such testing data is important for Tennessee.

“I want to make certain that we’re able to continue comparing Tennessee to Montana or California or Michigan,” he said. “If we really want to be No. 1 in the nation in education, we need to be able to measure apples to apples across states.”

Incidentally, the TCAP exam that Sexton wants to scrap is the same standardized test that a 2021 Republican-backed reading law uses as the only criterion to determine whether third-graders can progress to the fourth grade. Lawmakers have filed numerous bills this year to address concerns about the retention policy, which kicks in with this year’s class of third graders.

What other federal mandates are considered burdensome?

Few would dispute that accepting federal funding comes with a lot of red tape. Mounds of paperwork and numerous audits of how money is spent are all part of a huge bureaucratic infrastructure that comes with administering billions of dollars of federal funding.

But Sexton, who said there are “a gazillion restrictions” he doesn’t like, did not enumerate other burdens beyond testing, despite Chalkbeat’s multiple requests to his office for a list.

Marguerite Roza, a Georgetown University professor who researches education finance policy, said she suspects the bigger objections are related to current “culture wars” about curriculum and whether transgender students should be allowed to use school bathrooms or play sports consistent with their gender identity, which may not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

“Those strings come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights,” Roza said.

Civil rights enforcement is the mission of that office based on the passage of federal laws such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of education amendments passed in 1972, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, and disability.

And Tennessee has been at the forefront of culture war legislation. It passed more laws in 2021 aimed at limiting the rights of transgender people than any other state in the nation, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The state also has passed laws in recent years to prohibit the teaching of certain concepts related to race and sex in classrooms and to allow an appointed state panel to ban certain school library books statewide if members deem them inappropriate for the ages of students who can access them.

If Tennessee rejects federal funds, would the state still have to ensure students’ civil rights protections under federal laws, including for students with disabilities?

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is a federal funding statute that says schools must identify students with disabilities and provide them with a free and appropriate public education tailored to their needs. But generally speaking, legal experts say, those requirements apply only to states that accept IDEA funds.

“If I were a parent of a child with a disability, this would be a major concern,” said Gini Pupo-Walker, state director for The Education Trust in Tennessee. “Would my child’s rights and needs be protected without the federal funding and oversight?”

Sexton says the state would still fund services that are currently part of IDEA and would come up with a similar program that he believes could be better.

But the Tennessee Disability Coalition says there’s no assurance that a Tennessee version would give families the same or better protections than under IDEA or other federal laws designed to protect students with disabilities.

“It’s hard for the disability community to trust Tennessee when our state’s track record hasn’t been so great,” said Jeff Strand, the coalition’s government affairs coordinator. “Our state institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have a long history of abuses, and we continue to see a troubling pattern of actions such as our state’s choice not to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid services.”

Gov. Bill Lee speaks to advocates for people with disabilities gathered at the Tennessee State Capitol on Feb. 4, 2020.

Another concern is where families could appeal when the system isn’t working for their students. Under IDEA, they can call for a meeting at school to speak with teachers, administrators, and case managers. If they’re not satisfied, they can appeal all the way up to the Office of Civil Rights. Dozens of disability-related cases in Tennessee schools are currently being investigated by that federal office, which has the power to take away funding from states or schools that don’t follow the law.

“It’s already tough to live with a disability in Tennessee,” said Strand. “A change like this would cloud a specific longstanding avenue that ensures that the rights of students with disabilities are being protected. And it clouds it for no good reason.”

Beyond IDEA, federal civil rights laws are hard to unpack because some are also linked to receipt of federal funds, so it may depend on how state laws are structured.

The Office of Civil Rights also enforces Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a civil rights statute which prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities, as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which extends this prohibition against discrimination to government services such as public schools, regardless of whether they receive any federal financial assistance.

Several legal experts believe many Tennessee families likely would turn to the courts over alleged violations of those laws based on the state constitution, which guarantees equal access to a system of free public education, or the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law and due process of law.

“If you want to know how this change would affect children,” said Vanderbilt’s Shaw about the possibility of rejecting federal funds and restrictions, “there’s just a lot of uncertainty.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

How to grade schools post-pandemic? States must decide.

2023-02-01T12:00:00+00:00

Earlier this month, Massachusetts officials unveiled a new plan to hold schools accountable for students’ pandemic recovery. The pushback was swift.

Members of the state board of education questioned the pacing of the plan, which gives schools where students fell furthest behind up to four years to return to pre-pandemic academic levels. Worried the plan would widen achievement gaps, they called for more ambitious goals.

“We must do better,” one board member said, noting the generous federal aid schools received to speed students’ recovery.

At the following board meeting, held last week, school district leaders from across the state showed up to defend the plan. They enumerated the challenges students faced during the pandemic, from housing instability to poor mental health, and the staff shortages and other difficulties that continue to plague schools. The state must take those extraordinary circumstances into account, they argued.

“It is important that accountability systems be not only aggressive,” one superintendent said, “but also achievable and compassionate.”

This debate — in essence, whether to ease up on academic expectations or double down — is flaring up across the country as school accountability systems creak back to life after a pandemic pause.

Mandated by federal and state laws, the systems set goals for schools, rate their performance, and direct support to schools identified as struggling. But the pandemic has complicated every step of that process.

What are reasonable goals after student test scores plunged last year to their lowest level in decades? How to acknowledge schools’ dogged efforts to distribute meals and laptops, offer COVID testing, and track down missing students during a public health crisis, while still insisting that they provide students a rigorous education? And what is the right way to target support when so many students need so much help?

As states try to answer those questions, longstanding disagreements over testing students and rating schools have resurfaced — and calls to rethink those practices have grown.

“I do think the status quo is being questioned,” said Chris Domaleski, associate director of the Center for Assessment. “There’s an appetite for lasting changes to accountability.”

Are states asking too much of schools — or not enough?

During the first two years of the pandemic, the federal government gave schools a reprieve from accountability. Now that grace period is over.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education resumed enforcement of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, the 2015 law that requires states to identify the lowest performing schools based on test scores and other metrics. The agency allowed states to adjust their accountability systems to account for pandemic disruptions, including missing data from when tests were suspended or scaled back.

One of the most common changes was to recalibrate growth measures, which track how much students improve on tests over time. Due to missing data, some states compared students’ test scores from last year to pre-pandemic, while other states simply scrapped that metric. In some cases, those arcane technical changes made a big difference in school ratings.

In Virginia, which made a number of such changes, 10% of schools received a low rating last fall — only slightly more than before the pandemic despite a major decline in test scores. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and state education officials said the school rating system, which was established under a Democratic administration, obscured the extent of students’ academic struggles by giving schools too much credit for progress over pass rates.

“This masks the catastrophic learning losses experienced by our most vulnerable students,” said Jillian Balow, Virginia’s superintendent of education, in a statement when the ratings were released.

In Arizona, the number of grade K-8 schools earning As or Bs actually increased last year compared with before the pandemic. Some critics questioned the high ratings when state tests showed that only a third of students were proficient in math last year.

But Kathy Hoffman, the former state superintendent of education who lost her bid for reelection in November, said schools should be recognized for making progress.

“I do think growth is really important for Arizona schools to be striving for,” she said, adding that students improved their test scores more than expected from 2021 to 2022.

In North Carolina, school grades moved in the opposite direction, with more than 500 additional schools earning D or F grades last fall than did so before the pandemic. In that state, student growth counts for just 20% of a school’s annual rating, compared with 50% in Arizona.

“The current accountability model does not do justice to the hard work that teachers and students put in every day in schools across the state,” said Catherine Truitt, North Carolina’s superintendent of education, in a statement when the results were announced.

California removed student growth from its school ratings last year, but plans to bring it back in 2023 and add additional measures of student progress, said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the state board of education. Because lower-income students tend to have lower test scores, rating schools on student achievement rather than growth punishes schools serving more poor students, she added.

“Comparing their outcomes in school when you haven’t evened out the playing field for them, either in or outside of school, doesn’t tell you much about what the school is contributing,” said Darling-Hammond, who is also an education professor at Stanford University.

States debate what to do with struggling schools

All the hand wringing over school ratings might suggest that they carry dire consequences for schools. But in most cases, they don’t.

Under ESSA, the main upshot for struggling schools is an increase in federal aid and a requirement to create improvement plans. However, many states have used the law’s flexibility to limit how many schools are identified as struggling, according to an analysis of 10 states by the education advocacy group All4Ed. While some states targeted more than half of schools for extra support, other states identified fewer than 5%, the group found.

Some state officials blame limited funding and capacity for the low numbers, said Anne Hyslop, All4Ed’s director of policy development, who co-authored the report.

“A lot of states will say, ‘We don’t want to over-identify schools, but then not be able to give them money and other resources to actually make improvements,’” she said.

Hyslop said states could have “supercharged” their accountability systems last year by funneling some of their federal pandemic aid to struggling schools. However, she saw little evidence of that happening.

It was a “missed opportunity,” she said, to “see this restart of the accountability system as part of the COVID recovery effort.”

In some states, persistently low-rated schools can face harsh interventions, such as state takeovers. But states typically avoid such drastic measures.

Massachusetts law, for example, allows the state to appoint an official to take control of any chronically low-performing school district. However, only three districts are currently under state control, and Boston struck a deal to avoid that fate last year.

This month, state lawmakers introduced a bill to revoke the state’s authority to take over districts. Instead, the state would have to give more money to struggling schools, and districts would create plans to address the “root causes” of schools’ low achievement. The bill would also end the state’s requirement that high schoolers pass an exam to graduate.

“We definitely think it’s time to change the way we go about assessment and accountability in the state,” said Lisa Guisbond, executive director of the advocacy group Citizens for Public Schools.

But critics say that softening accountability would let schools off the hook for catching students up — even as they have an unprecedented amount of funding to aid their recovery efforts.

“We’re not really interested in listening to excuses for why it can’t be possible or giving more grace,” said National Parents Union co-founder Keri Rodrigues, whose children attend Massachusetts schools. “What we’re looking for is urgency.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

IPS test scores have rebounded close to pre-pandemic levels, but remain far from 2025 goal

2023-01-31T12:30:00+00:00

Like many teachers, Indianapolis Public Schools teacher Jacob Gregory returned to in-person learning in 2021 facing an uphill battle.

His sixth grade math students at McKinley School 39 had been through a disruptive mix of learning models since the pandemic hit in 2020 and closed schools.

When IPS went to a hybrid model in the 2020-21 school year, for example, Gregory would at times look up to see only three kids sharing the same classroom with him.

Predictably, IPS students’ proficiency on the 2021 ILEARN test — the state exam in grades 3-8 used for federal and state accountability purposes — declined. But the 2021-22 school year, when all students returned to in-person learning, marked a fresh start.

“That was the year that I really just said, ‘Okay we’re not online anymore. It’s time to get back to what we’ve been doing,’” Gregory said.

That determination by Gregory and his colleagues paid dividends. On last year’s ILEARN test, 21.3% of McKinley’s students were proficient in both English Language Arts and math, compared to just 9.7% the year before. That’s one of the best improvement rates for any school in IPS, excluding Innovation Network charter schools.

The school’s results reflect a districtwide academic recovery from the pandemic, as measured by the ILEARN test. In fact, IPS had among the highest ILEARN growth rates in Marion County from 2021 to 2022.

In IPS last year, 22.3% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in English, and 19.5% were proficient in math.

But that growth has only taken students’ scores back to roughly what they were in 2019, the first year for ILEARN. IPS remains far from its goal of having half its students proficient in English and math on the state test by 2025.

As students in grades 3-8 prepare to take the ILEARN again beginning in April, the district is focusing on tactics to continue its progress and reach that goal, with the help of federal COVID relief funding.

In IPS last year, 22.3% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in English, and 19.5% were proficient in math.

But at McKinley, like the rest of the district, Black and Latino students still have not reached pre-pandemic achievement levels on the ILEARN.

While Black and Latino students grew in proficiency in both subjects last year, proficiency rates for white students grew significantly more. And unlike their white peers, whose ILEARN scores in 2022 exceeded their 2019 results, test scores for Black and Latino students still have not recovered.

The improvement in the district’s test scores stem from several efforts made throughout the pandemic, including those supported with $14.3 million in COVID relief funds IPS has set aside specifically for English and math improvement. That’s a small share of the $217.5 million in federal COVID funding IPS received through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program for its non-charter schools.

But even with last year’s improvement and millions of dollars in one-time funding, is the district’s 2025 goal for test scores feasible?

“I’ll say it’s ambitious,” said Warren Morgan, the IPS chief academic officer. “We’re just continuing to track towards it.”

The district has a long way to go to reach 50% — but even increasing proficiency rates by just 10% to 12% by 2025 would be a major accomplishment, said John Kuykendall, associate professor and dean for the University of Indianapolis School of Education.

“I think to get there … in two years, you’re going to also have to focus on the basic needs of kids, too,” Kuykendall said. “What do they need to be ready to be able to come to school and learn?”

Officials credit new curriculum for score boosts

At McKinley, staff attribute the school’s successful rebound in part to solid teamwork and strong staff retention rates. IPS has increased its districtwide teacher retention rate from 71.3% in 2018-19 to 83.9% in 2020-21, according to state data. Retention rates for individual schools are not available.

“I’m going to keep saying, ‘You can do this. We’ll get it done. We’ll figure out a way to do it one way or another,’” Gregory said, recalling his mindset through the 2021-22 academic year.

Throughout the pandemic, McKinley Principal Deana Perry tried to maintain a semblance of a school community. The school made drive-through versions of school events, like a carnival and winter wonderland celebration, when classrooms were closed. Perry went to the downtown Panera each week to bring extra baked goods for staff and families on “carb days” every Friday.

This book vending machine at McKinley School 39 encourages students to read by buying books with a token. Students earn a token when they complete their monthly reading log and get a token for their birthday.

But districtwide, a variety of other efforts may have played a part.

Morgan attributes much of the ILEARN improvement to an overhaul in curriculum that began in 2020.

“We were not using high-quality texts across the board,” he said, adding that in some cases, curriculum hadn’t been updated for years.

The district spent $3 million in federal COVID aid for a “rigorous, aligned curriculum” and $1.4 million to train staff and offer other professional development for the curriculum changes.

At McKinley, math scores rose from 23.8% to 37.6% from 2021 to 2022, a feat that Perry attributes to the school’s early exposure to the new Eureka Math program before the rest of the district.

IPS taps tutoring as key improvement strategy

The school’s staff aren’t content just to point to last year’s progress.

In her office, Perry has her ILEARN goals for this school year written on a whiteboard.

She hopes 27% of her students at McKinley reach proficiency in English on the ILEARN when they take it in just a few months, and 41.4% hit proficiency in math. She hopes her school reaches that 50% mark by 2025 along with the district.

“We’re committed to supporting that goal,” Perry said.

Gregory is certainly energized. By the time he returned from the winter break in early January, he had been ready to return to work for a week.

In Gregory’s eyes, the 50% proficiency goal for IPS might be ambitious, but it’s still an F — he’s aiming for even higher passing rates.

The school’s English Language Arts scores haven’t quite rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. But Perry said that in professional development sessions, her staff are still working on mastering the new English curriculum that the district introduced during the pandemic.

“While we do discuss math, we really put a lot of emphasis on ELA,” Perry said.

Just as IPS relied on COVID relief to help test scores rebound from 2021 to 2022, the district is hoping that a variety of districtwide initiatives launched during the pandemic will help McKinley and other schools continue to improve and reach its 2025 goal.

The district has allotted $2.4 million in federal aid for several tutoring programs, the largest of which is Tutoring for All. The program, which IPS launched districtwide in the fall, allows students to voluntarily sign up for virtual tutoring outside of school hours.

Last semester, weekly student attendance ranged from 482 to 1,127, according to the district. Roughly 1,500 students attended at least one session.

“This is our first year really doing it,” Morgan said of Tutoring for All. “And so we’re monitoring things as things go along. Of course, we want to see how we can get more people to know about it.”

Even though IPS has been back to in-person learning for some time, virtual learning has played a large role in the district’s plan for post-pandemic recovery.

Eleven schools also have in-class virtual tutoring. This program at chronically underperforming IPS schools — known as Emerging Schools — allows students to receive individualized attention and get them back to grade level.

Keith Utter, a fifth grade teacher at Charles Warren Fairbanks School 105, said the program has helped provide one-on-one instruction from tutors from all over the country during the school day. Utter provides additional help to students as they need it.

“In the morning when you come into my room, you’ll see the kids eating their breakfast, but as soon as 9:15 comes around they’re all logged in. Their eyes are glued to their teachers, because they do enjoy it,” Utter told the IPS school board at a meeting last month. “There’s 100% engagement, which is a great way to start the day.”

Adopting such virtual teaching models is one way Kuykendall says districts can recover from pandemic learning loss.

“We’re going to have to encourage our teachers to have different kinds of instructional methods and pedagogy to engage these students in different ways, because they were off for so long and they were comfortable in a Zoom format,” he said.

Making school staff aware of racial disparities

Despite the improvements, the district still has to contend with gaps that persist among racial and ethnic subgroups. A pillar of the district’s strategic plan is to reduce those disparities.

Along with its 2025 goal for all students, IPS aims to have 50% of Black and Latino students meet or exceed grade-level performance in English and math by the same year. Those groups combined represent roughly 73% of the IPS non-charter student population.

Those disparities exist at McKinley, too. While 28.8% of white students at the school were proficient in both English and math, only 17% of Latino students and 8.8% of Black students were proficient on last year’s ILEARN.

Increasing parental involvement and ensuring that students have the necessary support to do well in school are some of the ways the district can try to close those academic disparities, which have persisted in education for decades, Kuykendall said.

“For IPS, the challenge will be in ensuring that marginalized populations have the adequate resources to meet that goal,” he said.

Morgan said IPS has instituted training about implicit bias for leaders, and has shared academic and disciplinary data on Black and Latino students to make staff mindful of the disparities.

Emerging Schools have also adopted a coaching tool for teachers called CT3 that provides real-time feedback from teacher coaches watching from the back of the classroom, Morgan said.

“CT3 actually gives teachers the tools to actually be aware of being in a classroom — how are you responding to students? Are you calling on certain groups of students and not others?” Morgan said.

Meanwhile at McKinley, staff on the school’s racial equity team are reading a book, “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain,” with a plan to present its takeaways to the whole staff, Perry said.

As McKinley’s students prepare to take the ILEARN in a few months, Perry leans on her staff — which she calls her “dream team” — just as she did during the pandemic.

“They really are an amazing group of educators,” she said. “We all share the same common goal, which is to grow our students to be independent learners and thinkers, and to be successful in life.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

NYC is using one-time COVID money for a lot of education programs. What happens when it dries up?

2023-01-19T10:00:00+00:00

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City’s education department received a massive windfall: more than $7 billion in federal relief funding to help reopen school buildings and address lost instruction.

But city officials have used a significant chunk of that one-time relief on initiatives that have recurring costs. What happens to those efforts when the spigot of federal dollars dries up in 2024? That’s the question posed by a report released Thursday by Advocates for Children, which highlights hundreds of millions worth of programs that are currently being supported by federal funds.

The report is a “call to action” to draw attention to initiatives that could face cuts if the city doesn’t find a way to replace federal dollars, said Randi Levine, the policy director at Advocates for Children. “We want to make sure policymakers are aware of the wide range of important education initiatives that are currently being funded by expiring federal COVID-19 relief funding.”

A range of programs are receiving one-time federal money, including expanded summer school ($236 million), hundreds of new prekindergarten seats for students with disabilities ($88 million), screening for students with dyslexia and other literacy programs ($7.4 million), and a raft of hiring including new social workers and nurses (roughly $135 million).

City officials declined to say whether they plan to slash any of those programs or, if not, where the funding will come from.

“We are working closely with City Hall and our agency partners to find ways to sustain and build on the work we have done to lift up our students and schools,” education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle wrote in an email.

The programs are not necessarily at immediate risk, since the federal funding runs until the 2024-25 school year, though advocates argue the city should make plans to address the looming fiscal cliff now. Once the federal funding runs out, the city will have to either cut or find other money to replace about $881 million in annual spending on recurring programs that are currently receiving federal dollars, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

“I don’t think the intent [of the federal funding] was to support ongoing costs — these funds were clearly one-time,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group. “The city, the City Council, and the advocacy community is going to have to address [that] and make hard choices.”

The report does not document every example of the education department’s use of one-time relief money on recurring programs. But it highlights several high-profile examples. Here are five of them:

Preschool for 3-year-olds: $100 million

Mayor Eric Adams made waves when his administration rolled back plans to make 3-K universal, a major goal of his predecessor who intended to use more than half a billion dollars of federal money for that purpose. Officials redirected much of that funding to “central costs.” But even without the planned expansion, city officials will still need to find about $100 million each year to keep the program going at its current size, according to the Advocates for Children report.

Expanding 3-K was “built on recovery dollars that are running out,” schools Chancellor David Banks said at an event hosted by Educators for Excellence Wednesday evening. “We’ve got major issues that we’re going to have to deal with financially in terms of paying for that as well as other programs.”

More social workers, nurses, and staff to help homeless students: about $135 million

The education department hired a slew of people for non-teaching positions, including enough nurses to ensure every school had access to one, 500 social workers, and psychologists to speed up evaluations and the creation of individualized education programs for students with disabilities. The city also used the funding for 75 coordinators to help homeless families navigate the education system, though the hiring process has been slow.

Preschool for students with disabilities: $88 million

Many students with disabilities who are legally entitled to preschool seats have instead been forced to stay home because the city doesn’t have enough seats to meet demand. The problem was long considered a stain on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise of universal pre-K and the current administration has vowed to create enough seats for every child with a disability who is entitled to one. But that promise is being delivered with one-time relief money, raising questions about how the city will follow through on that goal after this school year.

Community schools: $60 million

Under de Blasio, there was steady growth in the number of schools that embedded wraparound services into school buildings through partnerships with nonprofit providers — including dental clinics, mental health services, and food pantries. The city has dedicated about $70 million over the last two years to increase the number of those schools from 266 to over 400 and reverse cuts that had been planned to those schools, according to the report.

Keeping school budgets steady: $160 million

City officials have kept school budgets higher than they would have been based on enrollment declines, a policy meant to stave off dramatic budget cuts while schools are trying to catch students up from pandemic disruptions.

Although Adams began the process of cutting school budgets this school year, a move that drew intense criticism, he reversed plans to make another round of cuts next school year – using relief funding to plug the gap. That move means that schools may face even more dramatic cuts down the line, as officials contend that school budgets will eventually need to be brought back in line with enrollment, though city officials have not released detailed plans.

“That’s a looming problem and it will be a bigger problem than it was last year,” Champeny said. “When those funds run out, how are we going to fund the schools and at what level?”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC Mayor Adams reverses course on $80 million schools cut in preliminary budget

2023-01-12T23:35:12+00:00

After a bruising battle last year over school budget cuts, Mayor Eric Adams reversed course Thursday on a plan to slash an additional $80 million next year from the coffers of schools that lost students during the pandemic.

In his preliminary budget, Adams announced plans to delay the previously scheduled cut, giving a temporary reprieve to schools who lost students during the pandemic and are still struggling with the effects of last year’s cuts. Some families, educators and advocates, however, argue that Adams should have gone even further by restoring the cuts he made last year.

“We heard from families [that] some schools need more time to adjust in order to avoid disruptions to students,” Adams said. “So despite the fiscal challenges we face, we have added an additional $80 million to that funding pool for next fiscal year.”

In addition to the delayed cut, Adams announced a $47.5 million investment to help secure school buildings by ensuring that all the doors lock, and front doors are equipped with cameras and buzzer systems, a major priority of schools Chancellor David Banks.

The proposed $80 million cut that Adams reversed on Thursday ties back to a heated debate over funding and school enrollment that came to a head last summer.

Schools generally lose money when they lose students, but former Mayor Bill de Blasio paused that rule during the pandemic, using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal relief money to plug the gaps.

Adams began scaling back that extra financial support when he took office, cutting the pot by more than half this year, and planning to chop it in half again next year, before zeroing out the aid in fiscal year 2025.

But on Thursday, even as he warned of strong fiscal headwinds and cut agency spending, Adams announced that he’s planning to suspend the planned $80 million cut to school budgets next year.

Still, Adams emphasized that he believes it’s important to return soon to “developing school budgets based on the number of students enrolled in the school and the needs of those students.” Budget officials noted that federal relief money will run out next year, meaning the city will face critical decisions about spending.

Some advocates expressed relief about the decision to hold school budgets level. Others blasted the mayor for making cuts elsewhere, including rolling back a planned expansion of preschool for 3-year-olds.

“Mayor Adams continues to propose austerity measures that harm children, families, schools and communities,” said Amshula Jayaram, campaign director of Alliance for Quality Education, an organization that advocates for more school funding. “At a time when our children need intense social, emotional and academic support, Mayor Adams continues to trim services for students.”

An Adams spokesperson didn’t immediately say whether the administration is still planning to entirely cut the pandemic relief for schools with enrollment drops in fiscal year 2025.

The mayor will release an updated version of his $102 billion proposal in April, known as the executive budget. The City Council must approve a final budget by July 1.

Education department still expected to cut costs

Despite the temporary reprieve on enrollment-based school cuts, the education department, like agencies across the city, is still expected to slash expenses in order to help the city balance its budget.

Adams cited a “perfect storm” of financial challenges brought on by a slowing economy and lower tax revenues, unexpected expenses related to the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, and additional costs that come with renegotiating contracts with labor unions.

In Adams’s November financial plan, he proposed diverting $568 million in federal COVID relief money originally slated to expand the 3-K program to cover other education department costs.

Adams and education department officials have argued that they are right-sizing the program, and shifting seats in response to 19,000 empty seats. On Thursday, budget officials said the city would open more seats if they found a need after their review of the program.

But the cuts have drawn criticism from members of the City Council, who will work with Adams in the coming months to agree on a final budget.

“The budget vision put forward by the Administration to cut funding for CUNY, libraries, social services, early childhood education, and other essential services for New Yorkers is one this Council cannot support,” Council Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan and Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement Thursday morning criticizing the November financial plan.

Budget officials said the education department will be expected to eliminate 390 vacant positions, none of which include teachers or administrators.

Adams pledges $47.5 million to equip schools with locking front doors

The preliminary budget also includes a proposed $47.5 million to equip schools with locking doors and cameras that allow school safety agents to monitor who they’re letting in the front door.

Banks has raised the issue of locking front doors frequently in conversations about school safety and in the wake of last year’s elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas.

The number of guns confiscated from students at city schools jumped last year as teens expressed fears of dangerous commutes, though none of the guns were used in schools.

There have also been several reports of intruders getting inside city school buildings in recent months, putting families and educators on edge.

Adams said the new technology will “allow all the other school doors to be locked, but put a camera with a buzzer system on the front door that allows the [school safety agent] to sit there and see the person before they let them inside the school … we’re looking to put it in all our schools.”

An Adams spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a question about the timeline for rolling out the technology to all schools.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

New data shows fewer students per counselor at nation’s schools, but caseloads remain high

2023-01-09T12:00:00+00:00

The ratio of students to counselors in the nation’s public schools has reached its lowest point in at least 36 years, spurred both by an influx of new counselors and a nationwide decline in student enrollment, according to new data.

The dual trends left schools with an average of 408 students for every counselor last school year, according to the American School Counselor Association’s analysis of federal data. That’s lower than the 424 to 1 ratio pre-pandemic, but still significantly higher than the 250 to 1 recommended by the counselors group.

“While not the optimal ratio, it’s still good news,” said Jill Cook, executive director of ASCA.

Lower average caseloads can mean counselors have more time to spend with each student, fulfilling an especially important role as students struggle mentally and academically in the wake of the pandemic. But experts caution that the pattern remains uneven across states and that focusing too heavily on national or statewide statistics can obscure stark disparities between districts and the true accessibility of counselors at individual schools.

The national data comes even as efforts to hire school psychologists and counselors have stumbled across the country, with many large school districts failing to add new counselors. As of last fall, many counseling positions remained unfilled.

Still, between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, the nation’s public schools saw the number of counselors jump by more than 1,200, while student populations dropped by nearly 1.4 million. Research has shown that a smaller ratio can help boost some students’ academic performance while reducing disciplinary infractions.

Cook attributed the increased number of school counselors to a heightened awareness of their importance during the pandemic and a flood of federal relief funds that helped bolster mental health support.

She pointed to several states that have made significant strides in recent years, like California and Illinois. In the past year, Illinois saw its total number of counselors increase by more than 700 — offsetting an initial loss of around 400 counselors in the first full pandemic school year.

But with relief funds set to expire in the coming years and future enrollment trends uncertain, Cook said it’s unclear whether the decreased ratios can be sustained.

“At some point the federal funding won’t be there,” Cook said. Counselors hired during the pandemic are saying, “‘Will this position still be here in three, or four, or five years?’”

Mandy Savitz-Romer, who researches school counseling at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, cautioned against reading too much into the state and national figures.

“When we talk to the states about these caseloads, they’re frustrated by the fact that people tend to use them to make policy decisions, when they are not accurately representing student access to counselors,” she said. “That’s the key issue — having a low caseload does not mean students have access to counselors. Those counselors in a state with a low caseload could spend the majority of their time proctoring tests.”

Understanding students’ access to counselors requires looking at how much time school counselors spend engaging with students and the level of support and commitment for counseling from each school, Savitz-Romer said, among other factors.

Still, there’s some information that can be gleaned from the numbers.

“These caseloads are beginning to tell us that if a student is fighting with 600 other students for time with a counselor, they’re not going to have their needs met — and quite honestly, that’s true with 400, too,” she said. “The real question is: What are we committed to providing to our students at this moment when there is such a crisis going on? These caseloads don’t suggest that we’re really committed to addressing it.”

As the nation sees some progress on the overall ratio, for some states, the needle is moving in the opposite direction.

Between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, Tennessee saw its ratio rise from 301 to 1 to 458 to 1, as the state lost more than 1,100 counselors and 18,000 students, the federal figures show. New York lost nearly 2,000 counselors as well as more than 144,000 students, raising the average number of students per counselor from 361 to 460.

Meanwhile, Indiana had the nation’s highest ratio of students to counselors at 694 to 1, after losing nearly 700 counselors during the pandemic.

A spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Education declined to comment on the loss of counselors. Spokespeople for the New York State Education Department and the Tennessee Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Losses in those states and others may be prompted by nationwide staffing shortages, more social workers being hired by schools, budget cuts, as well as school counselors who choose to leave due to the immense pressure that comes with the position, Savitz-Romer said. School counselors are also forced to juggle additional administrative duties, adding stress when already stretched thin.

“They’re realizing that their job is impossible, and when someone’s job is impossible, it leads to higher levels of burnout,” Savitz-Romer said.

In Tennessee, Amy Baltimore, advocacy director for the Tennessee School Counselors Association, blamed a myriad of issues, including fewer students pursuing training to become a school counselor.

“But it’s also because our role is just not protected in Tennessee,” she said. “School counselors get pulled into all kinds of other roles than what aligns with their training, whether it’s truancy or master scheduling or many other needs. These are helping professionals whose general nature is to help others — they’re ‘yes’ people. But eventually they get burned out and move on to other things.”

Counselors must also act as “stewards of student trauma,” a role made exponentially more difficult amid the pandemic’s toll on student mental health, Savitz-Romer said.

“We’re seeing counselors leaving roles because their own mental health is being compromised,” she said.

That was the case for Anna Sutter, a former school counselor at a public school district in Indianapolis, Indiana.

During her five years in the field, she routinely skipped lunches, lost sleep, and worked upwards of 12-hour days. One morning, she woke up “an anxious mess” at 3:30 a.m. and immediately headed to her office to get an early start — because once the students arrived on campus, it was “crisis central.”

“The boat was sinking and on fire,” she said, adding that many of the more than 600 students in her caseload were grappling with mental health crises, fights, failing grades, pandemic losses, and more. With so many urgent concerns, students with other needs — like post-secondary guidance or raising a C to a B — had a harder time finding support, Sutter added.

“I wish I could have helped students who weren’t in crisis, but still needed me,” she said.

Marta Aldrich contributed reporting.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Education issues to watch in Albany: School funding, mental health, future of mayoral control

2023-01-03T16:30:16+00:00

As districts continue to recover from the academic and social-emotional impacts of the pandemic, New York state lawmakers will be pressed to address several issues facing schools during the new legislative session.

Inflation has driven up the cost of finishing the long-awaited process of fully funding Foundation Aid, the state’s main school aid formula. As the country faces the risk of a recession, advocates worry about whether lawmakers will fulfill their promise to finish funding the formula.

Advocates also say they will push for solutions to issues that have become more pressing during the pandemic, including hiring challenges and student mental health, while others will continue a yearslong push for the state to raise the charter school cap.

Here are some of the education issues that may come up in the new legislative session, which is set to start Wednesday:

Inflation adds pressure to cost of funding schools

Last year, state lawmakers promised to spend billions of more dollars to fully fund Foundation Aid, which accounts for the bulk of financial support that school districts receive from the state. They agreed to fund the formula over three years, with the final phase-in scheduled for the 2023-24 fiscal year.

However, high inflation rates have pushed the projected cost for the final phase-in of the money from a $1.9 billion increase to about $2.7 billion.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who agreed to fulfill the formula last year as part of a legal settlement, has declined to say whether she will include this final, larger payment in next year’s budget. Both advocates and lawmakers say they’re concerned, but they haven’t yet heard any reneging on Hochul’s promise.

“There is a very high level of commitment on the part of my fellow legislators to see that this Foundation Aid promise is completely followed through on and fulfilled,” said Sen. John Liu, a Queens Democrat who oversees the Senate’s New York City education committee. “It should be the governor’s self-imposed mandate as well.”

Separately, state policymakers are also asking for $1 million to hire researchers who will review and create models to update the 15-year-old Foundation Aid formula. State officials and advocates contend the formula needs an update because it has outdated measures, such as for calculating student poverty, which is currently based in part on 2000 Census data.

“Let’s get recommendations from experts to make it more equitable,” said Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance for Quality Education.

Will Hochul try to lift the cap on charter schools?

One question is whether the governor will actively seek to lift the cap on how many charter schools can open in New York. After silence on the issue on the campaign trail, Hochul said she supported lifting the cap when asked about it during a gubernatorial debate with Republican opponent Lee Zeldin.

Under the cap, 460 charter schools are allowed to operate in New York, including 290 in New York City, which was reached in 2019. Overall, enrollment has grown in New York City’s charter sector while enrollment has dropped in traditional public schools. But the picture is more complicated: Nearly 60% of individual charter schools have enrolled fewer students during the pandemic.

Hochul’s office declined to say whether she will push to lift the cap this year. Some charter advocates, who have pushed for it for years, are hoping she does.

In a statement after the election, James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter Center, said the organization was looking forward to “supporting her efforts to lift the cap.”

Hochul’s campaign received at least $70,000 in campaign donations across two pro-charter political action committees. However, she also received more than $186,000 across the city, state, and national teachers unions, which generally oppose the expansion of charter schools.

Liu said he doesn’t expect her to touch the issue, noting that she simply replied “yes,” to the debate question of whether she supports lifting the cap, which is different from actively pursuing the issue.

Even if she does, it’s not likely she’ll find considerable support in the legislature, as the issue has not gained traction in recent years.

Schools continue to struggle with hiring and student mental health

Some advocates are hoping for solutions to the hiring challenges that many schools are facing.

Bob Lowry, deputy director for advocacy and communication at the state’s Council of School Superintendents, said it has been one of the biggest issues that school leaders have reported to his organization during the pandemic. The issue came up during a recent state Assembly hearing and has plagued districts nationally, too.

“We hear from districts, ‘We’d like to hire more mental health professionals to help, but we can’t find people,’” Lowry said.

Lawmakers have floated a tax incentive for school employees as one way to attract people to school districts, NY1 reported. Lowry pointed to “useful steps” that have already taken place, such as the state education department ending the controversial edTPA certification exam that was previously required of teaching candidates in New York. Separately, Hochul successfully proposed lifting the cap on how much retired school staffers could earn without losing their pensions if they returned to schools, but Lowry noted that law is only in effect for this school year.

“It’s a huge issue — [we’re] not completely sure what to do about it, but continuing the exemption for retirees to work without losing pension benefits is kind of a simple straightforward step to take,” Lowry said.

School leaders also continue to report big challenges in dealing with student mental health, Lowry said, and they’re hoping for more targeted funding to address those concerns.

Federal relief money likely helped districts address some of these issues, but these funds will sunset next year. It’s possible that increases in Foundation Aid can also help. Last year’s budget included $100 million over two years that would be available to school districts as grants to address mental health issues in schools. State officials plan to award those funds through a competitive process they will launch this year, according to a spokesperson for the state education department.

“We don’t see the mental health issues diminishing any time soon,” Lowry said. “We think there will be a need for continuing, targeted funding for schools to help with mental health concerns.”

State looks to compare NYC’s mayoral control to other districts

Last legislative session, lawmakers extended New York City’s mayoral control system of schools — where the mayor effectively has control over policy decisions instead of a school board — by another two years.

This year, Liu said lawmakers will begin looking at how other school governance systems across the nation operate and compare that to “20 years of [mayoral] control experience in New York City and see how to best bring schools forward.”

Liu declined to share more details, including whether there would be public hearings or some sort of formal review. But his comments indicate that lawmakers are interested in potential changes to the city’s governance system when they must again decide in 2024 whether to extend mayoral control.

Their decision this year to extend mayoral control by two years — half of what Mayor Eric Adams and Hochul requested – came with tweaks meant to add more parent representation to the system.

“This year, we have a little bit more breathing space,” Liu said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

13 education data stories that explained U.S. schools in 2022

2022-12-29T15:00:00+00:00

A map, a graph, a timeline: When we think about data in news stories, our minds naturally jump to these kinds of visual elements. But the core of data journalism is less about specific charts, and more about scale—it gives us a way to understand big stories and lots of numbers, by analyzing and aggregating them until we can see the shape of the trends within.

2022 was my first full calendar year as the editor of Chalkbeat’s data team, and what a year for data it was. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the stories that we feel captured our best work, and help sum up a busy 12 months reporting on education data across America.

1. NYC parents, was your child exposed to COVID? Here’s what to do next

It’s easy to forget now, but at the start of 2022 there was still a lot of confusion around what the return to school meant for public health: Policies around masking, quarantine, and contact tracing were all changing rapidly. Our team worked with Chalkbeat editors and reporters in New York City to create an interactive flowchart to reduce some of that confusion, so that parents could walk step by step through the requirements if their child or a classmate tested positive.

2. What five graphics tell us about COVID vaccine disparity in Chicago schools

Once vaccines were approved for children, they became part of a layered public health strategy for school districts trying to get kids back into classrooms. But like so much about COVID, vaccine distribution also revealed persistent inequality. In Chicago, data analysis from the district’s vaccination dashboard showed an organization struggling to keep kids safe, especially in historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the South Side of the city.

3. Technology, Skyline rollout dominate Chicago Public Schools’ federal relief vendor spending

With the pandemic came federal money, through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, also known as ESSER I, II, and III. Flush with cash, school districts across the country channeled money into renovation, hiring, and equipment.

On this story, we looked at the data from Chicago Public Schools’ spending, to see who was making the most from ESSER purchases. Unsurprisingly, the tree map at the top shows how more than half of all spending went to only 10 mega-vendors out of almost 1,000 companies in the dataset.

4. How the COVID-19 pandemic is changing school data

Pandemics are natural data stories, but they are also big data events for governments and school administrations, and many states responded accordingly. Data reporters Kae Petrin and Kaitlyn Radde collaborated on this story to explore how COVID had exposed weaknesses in school data infrastructure, and the improvements they were making in response.

5. Nonbinary students aren’t reflected in federal civil rights data. That might change.

In a similar vein, this story from Kae Petrin looked into a proposed change from the federal Office of Civil Rights that would expand the gender categories used in state-reported data on harassment, absenteeism, and sexual assault. More than just a demographic marker, these kinds of changes — highlighted in a map from Cam Rodriguez — also show the seams of our patchwork educational system, and where they sometimes strain to keep up with social change.

6. In New Jersey, thousands of Black and Hispanic students are shut out of AP classes

One of the advantages of working on data at Chalkbeat is our local coverage, and the ability to work with bureaus that are deeply sourced in their communities. This story by Patrick Wall is a perfect example, as it digs into New Jersey’s AP class attendance gap, and its disproportionate effect on students of color, including maps and graphs from Cam Rodriguez that put the disparity into sharp contrast.

7. How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum in Tennessee and nationwide

This year saw the political debate around critical race theory — the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism and that is not commonly taught in primary or secondary schools — turned into an ongoing controversy around reading material in libraries and classrooms. For this enterprise story, our team added context for objections that parents had raised against the curriculum used by Williamson County, which included accusations of racism against Ruby Bridges’ autobiography and an assertion that a book on seahorses normalizes male pregnancy. We also wrote up some of our notes on the development of the visualization.

8. Nation’s report card: Massive drop in math scores, slide in reading linked to COVID disruption

After a year of delay from its normal schedule, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released test results that showed just how severely students were affected by learning loss during the pandemic. Our team worked with all of Chalkbeat’s bureaus to analyze these scores around the country, including demographic breakdowns. On the national level we also added comparisons to the impact of remote learning by state.

9. Online enrollment grows in Colorado but some say more accountability is needed

Analysis of NAEP scores showed that students didn’t clearly lose or gain in online schools, but that those schools’ growth hasn’t always been transparent. This report by Colorado reporter Yesenia Robles and data team member Kae Petrin dove deep into concerns around graduation rates and academic achievement at virtual schools, as well as wide gaps in the state’s data on their effectiveness.

10. As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

Pandemic relief funds were a windfall for many districts, especially after years of tight budgets at high-poverty schools. But with ESSER money due to expire soon, questions remain about how to make those changes sustainable and address historical underfunding. Our team worked on several ways to visualize this problem, including a spike map that juxtaposes population against per-student funding.

11. Ahead of school closures, 5 takeaways about the number of schools and students in Denver

Nationwide, shrinking school enrollment has led districts to make hard choices about keeping schools open, especially as smaller schools are more expensive and offer fewer options for each student. In Colorado, Chalkbeat has covered the debate over school closures, including this analysis-based story on how Denver school growth (both district and charter) has tracked against the student population.

12. Interest in running for Indianapolis school board drops to new low

Two sets of local elected officials became the center of intense (often negative) scrutiny this year: election supervisors and school boards. In Indiana, Cam Rodriguez worked with Chalkbeat and WFYI reporters to put together this comparison of election cohorts over time, showing how candidate interest in school board openings has dropped, even as the cost of running has increased.

13. Michigan students who are homeless more likely to be disciplined

Based on a University of Michigan study, this story features a map that isn’t just an illustration of population density (a common mistake) but gives readers a way to explore the relationship between school discipline and student homelessness.

Schools on track to meet COVID relief deadlines as spending surges, experts say

2022-12-20T19:40:00+00:00

Earlier this year, when $122 billion in pandemic aid remained largely untapped, analysts warned that public schools could forfeit some of the windfall unless spending sped up.

But by this fall, spending had kicked into overdrive. In September, schools were using just over $5 billion in pandemic aid per month — more than $1 billion above the monthly amount this spring, according to a recent analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

School officials say they expected spending to accelerate this school year as planned projects got underway. Now, in sharp contrast to earlier warnings, observers say most schools are on track to meet the deadlines and avoid losing any of the coveted federal funds.

“They had to increase their pace — and they did,” said Marguerite Roza, the lab’s director, who earlier this year said schools needed to spend more per month to exhaust their funds by the September 2024 deadline. Her forecast now: “I don’t think there will be any money left over.”

Roza said her concern with schools’ slower spending before was not the risk of missed deadlines, but the danger of students not getting academic and social support quickly enough. The delayed surge in spending could also precipitate a sharp drop off in services and staffing when the money runs out, she added.

The latest projections offer some validation to school district officials who say they have been steadily spending the federal aid even in the face of staff and supply shortages and critics who accused districts of dallying.

The school system in Wayne Township, Indiana, spent all of the first COVID relief package it received by the deadline in September, said Barry Gardner, who oversees the district’s finances. It has also drawn down nearly 80% of the second package, which expires next September.

The money has helped pay for ventilation upgrades, expanded summer school, tutoring, and mental health services, along with nearly 100 new staff positions — though about one-fifth remain unfilled due to hiring challenges, Gardner said.

Meanwhile, the district has been making plans for the final round of federal aid. It has already spent more than a third of the $37 million, and officials are confident they will use the remainder by the September 2024 deadline.

“This is the message that we’ve been saying all along,” Gardner said. “That we’ve been spending these dollars in a strategic fashion based upon the approved timelines.”

Since 2020, Congress has passed three pandemic aid packages for schools that amount to a staggering $190 billion. The vast majority of the money went to school districts, which could use it for a wide range of purposes — from purchasing masks and desk shields to renovating buildings and hiring teachers, tutors, and counselors.

The final funding infusion was the largest and most controversial. At $122 billion, it was bigger than any single investment the federal government had previously made in public schools. Unlike the first two packages, which had bipartisan support, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the final stimulus bill in March 2021 over the objections of Republicans, who called it unaffordable and unnecessary.

By early 2022, reports began to emerge that schools had so far spent just a fraction of the money in the final stimulus package, known as the American Rescue Plan. Schools acknowledged the slower-than-expected spending, citing hiring challenges and supply backlogs. But to critics, the sluggish pace suggested waste and inefficiency.

“While states and school districts sit on billions, students are struggling,” said South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in an August op-ed. He introduced a bill, backed by other Republicans, that would convert some of the unspent money into scholarships families could spend on tutoring or private school tuition.

Certain facts are not in dispute. Schools spent little of the $122 billion last academic year — only about 15%, according to Edunomics Lab’s estimate — though they continued spending down the earlier aid packages.

Schools also encountered real difficulties hiring personnel and purchasing supplies, which slowed down spending. Those challenges have continued into this year, with 45% of public schools reporting at least one unfilled teaching position and more than 80% reporting supply chain challenges, according to a nationally representative survey conducted in October.

But interpretations of those facts have varied wildly. While critics said it’s taken too long to get money out the door, others consider the criticism unfair.

“I’ve been calling this panic-mongering basically since day one,” said Jess Gartner, who runs Allovue, a school-finance technology firm.

She and others who work with school districts say criticism of their COVID spending misses the mark for several reasons.

First, the data is incomplete. Federal aid trackers do not capture districts’ real-time expenditures due to reporting lags. And expenses that are spread out over time, such as salaries, might not appear until later spending reports.

Second, districts have been drawing down the first two pools of pandemic aid before starting on the third, which schools have until fall 2024 to allocate.

“Any rational human being is going to spend the dollars that expire first,” Gartner said.

Also, as a condition of the stimulus money, Congress required states and school districts to consult community members and submit spending plans. The plans were not all approved until late 2021 — well into the 2021-22 school year and just as districts were starting to budget for the following fiscal year. Then schools still had to secure vendors, get additional approval for construction projects, and follow elaborate procurement rules.

“You don’t snap a finger and do that in a week,” said Dennis Roche, co-founder of Burbio, a data service that tracks school spending. “It takes time.”

Now, the final aid money is budgeted and long-planned programs are up and running.

For instance, one urban district launched a large-scale tutoring program this fall after nearly a year of planning and finding dozens of vendors, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner of the consulting firm Education Resource Strategies.

“Anecdotally, I have a sense that in a number of districts new initiatives that were in procurement, that were in the planning stage for a long time,” he said, “this fall got off the ground.”

While spending has sped up, it remains more of a marathon than a sprint for many school systems. That includes the one in Paterson, New Jersey, which received nearly $175 million in pandemic aid.

Supply chain issues have forced the district to plan far in advance, with some items that were ordered in May only arriving this month, said Richard Matthews, the business administrator. Other major expenditures that have been in the works, such as new HVAC units and a $14 million custodial contract, should commence next year.

Despite the complexities, Paterson has spent all of its round one funds and nearly 80% of its round two allotment, which helped fund summer and after-school programs, mental health services, and hiring bonuses. The district has also drawn down about 30% of its final aid package — nearly two years ahead of the deadline, Matthews said.

“We’re in pretty good shape,” he said.

Meanwhile, New Jersey lawmakers have questioned the pace of schools’ spending. But officials like Matthews say their top concern is putting the money to good use before it’s gone.

“Our challenge is to make sure not just that we spend it,” he said, “but we spend it wisely.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Update: This article has been updated to include Marguerite Roza’s assessment of the potential consequences of schools’ pace of pandemic aid spending.

New tool allows people to see how much federal COVID money Illinois schools have spent

2022-12-15T21:45:00+00:00

Illinois school districts have spent less than half of the roughly $7.8 billion the state got in federal COVID recovery money, according to a new spending dashboard launched today.

The Illinois State Board of Education published the data Thursday and said it would provide “real-time updates” on how districts have reported spending the money aimed at helping students recover from the pandemic.

“These funds are providing an unparalleled opportunity to transform systems of learning in Illinois that are more equitable, more inclusive, and more responsive to student needs,” State Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said in a press release.

So far, federal COVID recovery money has been spent on existing staff, technology, tutoring, and transportation. Some districts in Illinois and around the country are using the influx of cash to fix aging buildings. Others are using the money to expand pre-school and give high school students jobs.

A recent Chalkbeat and Better Government Association investigation found low-income districts, which got the most federal COVID money, have been slower to spend their allocations. Data obtained at that time showed about 40% of the money had been reported as spent. The new dashboard indicates about 47% has been spent. There may still be lags in when districts report spending the money.

Earlier this year, Chicago school board members raised concerns about how little COVID recovery money had been spent, particularly on student mental health. The new data indicates Chicago Public Schools has spent 52% of its federal COVID money.

The federal government approved three separate rounds of stimulus funding for schools as part of sweeping government aid doled out across the country in 2020 and 2021. The first wave of $569.5 million came one month into the pandemic under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act. The new dashboard shows nearly all of that money has been spent.

Congress authorized another massive infusion of money in 2021 to help districts recover from the academic and mental health setbacks spurred by the pandemic. Illinois received about $7 billion in these subsequent rounds. States and school districts must allocate the money by fall 2024.

According to the state’s press release, school districts are also required to “solicit local stakeholder input” and “make spending plans publicly available” for the most recent round of stimulus.

The state is also allowed to spend 10% of the money flowing to Illinois school districts. A large portion of that will go toward a high-impact tutoring program that hopes to reach more than 3,200 students.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s pre-K program will soon have seats for all children with disabilities who want one, mayor says

2022-12-13T21:43:57+00:00

Mayor Eric Adams committed Tuesday to addressing a longstanding shortage of preschool seats for students with disabilities, with plans to open 800 more of those spots for 3- and 4-year-old children by this spring.

The mayor will boost pay for preschool special education teachers, who typically earn up to $20,000 less than their general education counterparts, officials said. The city will also increase the school day in these programs by an hour and 20 minutes, matching the hours for general education preschool programs.

Adams announced the changes at a press conference in which he sharply criticized the system under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, charging that the lack of access for hundreds of students with disabilities “was just wrong” and meant that New York City’s lauded universal preschool program was never truly universal.

“Children who need it more were receiving less,” Adams said. “That is just dysfunctional at its highest level.”

Schools Chancellor David Banks said the teacher pay disparities were a result of “what happens when you don’t think it’s a priority.”

Universal prekindergarten was regarded as de Blasio’s signature achievement. But advocates criticized his administration for failing to provide seats for hundreds of children with disabilities or adequately paying teachers in those programs. At the end of last school year, about 800 preschool-aged children with disabilities were still awaiting seats, an education department official said at a City Council meeting in September.

For students with disabilities who did get seats, disparities remained. An analysis of the 2019-20 school year found that Black and Asian American preschoolers were less likely to be identified for special education services when compared with their white peers. Black and Latino children who were identified for services were more likely to be placed in settings exclusively for students with disabilities rather than classrooms integrated with students of mixed abilities.

The new plan is expected to help providers open more classes with a mix of students with disabilities and those in general education, officials said. The process of adding 400 new seats is already underway, said Deputy Chancellor Kara Ahmed, who oversees early childhood education. Officials did not say exactly when these seats will open.

The department approved funding increases for 65 community-based organizations that provide special education programs for the city’s youngest learners. The additional money will allow those programs to open new seats, extend class hours for students with disabilities, and boost wages for teachers.

The salary bumps will mean increasing salaries from the current range of $50,000-$58,000 up to a range of $68,000-$70,000, Ahmed told reporters. And doing so will allow existing programs to keep teachers and attract new ones, Ahmed said.

The city has also committed to opening another 400 new seats by sometime this spring.

“We plan to hold the administration accountable for delivering on that promise,” said Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children, a nonprofit organization that has for years pushed for more such seats, during Tuesday’s press conference. “The city has a legal obligation and a moral obligation to do so.”

The plan will cost $130 million during this fiscal year and the next one, and is being paid for using federal relief dollars, a department spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to say how the city plans to cover funding for those seats once the temporary dollars run out in 2024. That’s a larger question for many education department programs funded by relief dollars, including thousands of new 3K seats the city has opened over the past two school years.

Gregory Brender, policy director for the Day Care Council, said the plan includes positive steps, but noted that his organization wants the Adams administration to raise wages for all early childhood educators working for community-based programs. As of October 2020, these teachers are making the same amount as new public school teachers, even with 20 years of experience, Brender said.

In an interview, Levine noted that under the city’s plan, preschool special education teachers will now be paid as much as a new teacher who works for the education department.

“But every step helps,” she said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools spent $308 million on technology since March 2020. Now what?

2022-12-13T12:00:00+00:00

The COVID-19 pandemic and a historic infusion of federal dollars spurred a technology revolution in Chicago’s public schools — a monumental shift from a district where students had limited access to computers to one where officials say there are as many devices as students.

Chicago Public Schools leaders say this allows teachers to implement a new high-quality curriculum and to give students essential digital skills.

But the district does not have a clear, detailed plan for using the new devices to improve instruction or a reliable system to track what technology campuses have and how they use it, Chalkbeat and WBEZ have found.

Chicago Public Schools has spent more than $308 million on computers and other technology from its three main vendors since the pandemic forced schools to pivot to remote instruction in March 2020 through August this year, according to purchase order data reviewed by Chalkbeat and WBEZ. That’s roughly as much as these companies got paid during the previous two decades combined.

Roughly 40% of that spending took place after students returned to campuses for in-person learning in September 2021, at a time when leadership changes left the district without a top IT official for more than a year.

After months of questioning by Chalkbeat and WBEZ and several inaccurate estimates, officials said last week that they bought nearly 311,000 laptops and tablets. More than 41,000 of the devices are sitting in a warehouse or yet to be shipped by a manufacturer, according to CPS.

Once computers get to the schools, the district has no systematic way to track how they are being used. CPS’ system for tracking device availability on its campuses isn’t regularly updated, and it does not offer meaningful information about whether computers are used at all, Chalkbeat and WBEZ found. The school district depends on schools to take a regular inventory, but the process is time-consuming, and only 35% of Chicago’s 500 district-run schools have a technology coordinator on staff, CPS data shows.

The district inspector general’s office is reviewing CPS’ system for tracking technology assets and reporting that information, the office told Chalkbeat and WBEZ.

Meanwhile, the lack of a systemwide digital learning plan has left some educators seeking guidance on how to incorporate the computers into learning — and in some cases, leaving hundreds of devices to gather dust in storage.

Chicago school leaders note the initial technology expansion took place during a challenging pandemic stretch. They also stress that they have a window into technology use across the district thanks to regular conversations with principals and teachers. And they say educators get leeway on how to use technology based on their classrooms’ needs and goals.

District officials — and some educators — say the access to technology has been a crucial step forward, allowing schools to better gauge how much students are learning and to intervene with support tailored to their needs. That greater access has also been essential as Chicago Public Schools rolled out a $135 million Skyline curriculum for every grade and subject beginning last year.

But experts worry Chicago and other districts tapped federal pandemic recovery funds to amass devices without a strategy for making smart use of them or for replacing outdated computers once the money runs out. Chicago doesn’t have a long-term plan for updating and replacing computers. Instead, officials say they are hoping to persuade the federal government to keep chipping in.

Chicago officials say they are now working on a digital learning plan that would spell out how computers can better power student instruction, building on work they say began before the pandemic. They also say they expect to offer ongoing coaching and professional development for staff.

“I think it’s worthwhile to take a pause and look at what we’re doing here and make sure that the plan for the future is the right trajectory,” said Edward Wagner, deputy chief of Information Technology Services.

Chicago spends big after decades of device disparities

Teacher Daphne Whitington spent years dreaming of bringing an Advanced Placement research class to Julian High School on the Far South Side.

That wasn’t possible before COVID. Her school, serving a predominantly Black, largely low-income student body, never had enough computers, which are needed to scour peer-reviewed journals online and to organize findings.

On the eve of the pandemic, Whitington said the school had a room designated as a computer lab — full of woefully outdated PCs, most of which didn’t work.

“Having digital competency is a necessary part of education now,” she said. “It felt like a profound disparity prior to COVID. It felt like a blatant racial injustice.”

The district’s technology spending was already on the rise at the onset of the pandemic. Still, when COVID hit, only about 40% of Chicago Public Schools students had access to a computer for remote learning, according to documents the district provided to the federal government.

The COVID-19 outbreak set off a scramble to get devices into students’ hands. Some of the $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief funds Chicago Public Schools received powered the push.

The district also got $83.5 million through the federal Emergency Connectivity Fund, an effort to support district spending on devices and wireless access during the pandemic that gave districts fairly tight deadlines to use the money or lose it.

Even after students returned to campuses full time, the district continued to pour tens of millions of dollars into technology. It has spent $123 million on its three main technology vendors — CDW, Apple, and Virtucom — since in-person learning resumed in August 2021, according to purchase order data obtained by Chalkbeat and WBEZ. Most has been spent on laptops and tablets, though the district also bought interactive boards, headphones, projectors, video game consoles, and more. Overall, technology behemoth CDW Government, headquartered in Vernon Hills, is the outside vendor that received the most federal COVID relief money.

In recent weeks, the district struggled to provide Chalkbeat and WBEZ with a total for the devices it bought and handed out to schools. Of the 311,000 devices purchased, CPS says about 270,000 are tagged and assigned to a school or department.

It’s hard to confirm from district data CPS’ claim that it now has a device for each student. Many campuses have received significantly fewer devices since March 2020 than the number of students enrolled, though that might reflect disparities in technology available when COVID hit. The district says it can only estimate how many functioning devices appropriate for remote learning it had pre-pandemic.

Third grade students in Ms. Patiño’s class work on Diagnostic Testing on their chromebooks at Darwin Elementary School.

The influx of technology transformed the district

Inside Darwin Elementary School in Chicago on a recent Tuesday morning, one third grade classroom is nearly silent. Students are taking a math test on their laptops. Big headphones cover their ears.

In the other third grade classroom, a smartboard displays a list of discussion questions. The teacher leads a conversation about a book on the Great Chicago Fire.

“What does it mean to be uneasy?” she asks the class, telling them to draw on earlier lessons when they learned about feelings.

For years, Darwin had to dip into its school budget to provide computers to its mostly low-income Latino students. Then came the pandemic-era influx of devices. Now, the school has a Chromebook for each of its roughly 540 students.

This allows teachers to target instruction for individual students, Principal Daniel De Los Reyes said.

“So this differentiated instruction is actually at the core of what I feel is needed and technology allows us to dig further into that and actually live that out a bit more,” he said.

The federal windfall has meant schools like Darwin no longer have to pay for iPads and Chromebooks out of their own budgets, which gave an edge to wealthier schools that could fundraise for technology. The district now handles all device purchases centrally, officials said. That has helped it to address disparities and to ensure schools are prepared if another pandemic or even a major snowstorm abruptly shutters buildings, Wagner said.

District leaders also say a key rationale for the spending spree is the 2021 rollout of Skyline, the district’s digital curriculum bank — a project conceived on the cusp of the pandemic to give campuses easier access to quality, culturally relevant lessons. Skyline adoption is voluntary, but the district has been leaning more on schools to use it, and data shows Skyline usage increased tenfold this fall compared to last fall.

Skyline lessons can be and — in many cases — should be taught offline with students interacting and writing on paper, especially in the elementary grades. But Mary Beck, acting director of teaching and learning for CPS, says online features can enhance the learning experience. Skyline’s tests are available online, and educators can customize lessons and assignments to fit their students’ needs.

Some educators say this expanded access to technology has been transformational.

Thanks to the arrival of tablets for each student, Whitington was finally able to launch her AP research class last year. This fall, her juniors settled on research topics together, from laws that ban discrimination against natural hair styles to the lack of education on climate change in low-income schools. They are investigating them together online and collaborating even after the class is over.

But, she says, whether devices truly elevate learning is sometimes up to tech-savvy educators.

“Teachers who take an active interest in technology are going to be fine,” she said. “CPS needs to make sure that happens for everyone. I don’t think that’s happening at the moment.”

Teachers at Darwin Elementry School review data from monthly diagnostic tests to determine how to mold the results of testing to their specific learning.

No strategy, support as schools face ‘PTSD with the screens’

At one Chicago elementary school, a sizable shipment of devices arrived this fall. The principal, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly, said he didn’t ask for them.

But he can guess what happened.

Without a technology coordinator at the school, the “overwhelming” task of updating the district’s inventory system falls to him. He didn’t get around to logging some of the computers his school already had, so the district shipped more.

Only 174 of 500 district schools have technology coordinators, the district’s most recent staffing data shows. In addition, while some of the district’s massive spending on tech was underway, its top IT job sat vacant for more than a year. It was finally filled in October.

Meanwhile, educators at that principal’s school are often unsure how to meaningfully incorporate the computers into day-to-day learning. Some feel lingering technology fatigue after a challenging virtual learning stretch — a condition the principal described as “PTSD with the screens.”

Hundreds of computers from that fall shipment sit in a back room at his school.

“We have a lot of technology that kids are using to do school research and play games,” he said.

That school’s experience captures the challenges facing schools as the influx of technology has outpaced the district’s capacity to plan and strategize. In the absence of clear expectations, some educators are either passing on using the devices or using them in ways that don’t truly advance learning.

Several principals told Chalkbeat and WBEZ they got more devices than they know what to do with this fall. Wagner, the district’s deputy technology chief, said his department can tell which devices have been turned on at least once through its tracking system, but has no way to know if they are in regular use.

The district’s device inventory is its best window into tech availability across the city. But updating it can be a tall task in schools with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of students and devices.

Schools are encouraged to assign computers to students or educators who need them, marking those devices as “in use.” In the data provided to Chalkbeat and WBEZ with nearly 270,000 devices, only 86,000 — about one-third — are marked “in use.” The bulk of the devices, 170,000, are listed as “available.”

District officials and some principals stress most of those devices marked “available” are actually being used, but that either no one is changing the status or the computer is just not assigned to a specific student.

The remaining roughly 15,000 computers are marked as lost, stolen, recycled, or in repairs, the log of devices purchased since March 2020 shows.

The district also conducts an annual technology audit to get a firm count of its device inventory. But when Chalkbeat and WBEZ submitted a public records request for the latest audit from last spring, the district provided a one-page document that simply lists the number of schools that turned in any information on their assets for the audit. Still, the district says it will have a clearer picture of its device distribution once the latest audit is complete this coming spring.

In the midst of that annual audit process this fall, the principal at Jamieson Elementary School emailed families to say the Northwest Side school could not account for more than 100 Chromebooks, and asked families whose students might have borrowed them to return them.

Meanwhile, some educators say they need more guidance on using this more plentiful technology.

To some, the moment feels like a missed opportunity. Educators got more tech-savvy during the pandemic, and some used computers in innovative ways.

Hal Friedlander, of the nonprofit Technology for Education Consortium, said, ideally, district technology and education leaders, with input from teachers and experts, would work together to come up with a plan before buying devices. But COVID created an urgent demand and left little time for planning.

Kindergarten students in Ms. Bauman’s class work on word study using both the smart board and traditional paper.

Experts caution districts need blueprints and accountability

De Los Reyes, the Darwin principal, said district leaders have not given him and other school leaders instructions for using the technology in classrooms. But he believes the district should strike a balance between setting expectations and letting individual schools pick an approach that works best for their students.

In the younger grades, interacting with teachers and fellow students, as well as learning to write with a pencil, are crucial, he noted. But as students get older, using devices is a key skill they need as they go off to high school, college, and, eventually, into the workforce.

For teachers at Darwin, the influx of new technology has been a huge help.

They can see where students are struggling through the Skyline assessments students take on their devices. Then students get help online tailored to close those gaps.

“It allows us to put a pulse on achievement,” De Los Reyes said. “When you have one-to-one technology, we now have platforms where students can access their learning plan specific to their needs.”

District officials say they want what is happening at Darwin repeated across the district. Beck said she encourages principals to be thoughtful about incorporating technology into a student’s day.

“It’s not that a student is on a computer the entire time sitting next to somebody,” she said. “We really want teachers to adapt to the lesson and the content. You’ll see that students will close their Chromebooks and engage in conversation. It’s using it as a tool.”

Still, Beck insists “being one-on-one is vital.” She and other officials say it made sense to take advantage of available funding to get there.

But, experts say, simply purchasing computers is not enough. Districts need a strategy for use.

Joseph South, chief learning officer for International Society for Technology in Education, a nonprofit that advocates for the smarter use of classroom tech, said he sees an often fractured and passive use of technology in districts around the country, with devices being used as little more than TV sets.

Instead, he said, students should be using devices to “create, to problem solve, to communicate, to bring in experts from outside the four walls of the classroom.”

Too often, South said, the district technology leader will buy “stacks of devices, and send them out to schools and says, ‘OK, I’ve done my job.’ ”

“That’s actually a really ineffective way of deploying technology,” he said.

But often that’s what happens, said Bart Epstein, an expert at the University of Virginia and head of the nonprofit EdTech Evidence Exchange. School districts don’t know how often or how well students are using devices once they’re purchased.

He likened it to what would happen if districts bought a fleet of buses and parked them in a lot while students walked to school. The public, he says, would be outraged.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.

Tennessee private schools could get $60 million in leftover pandemic relief funds

2022-11-30T00:26:06+00:00

Tennessee is taking steps to ensure that private schools get the opportunity to receive nearly $60 million in unused federal COVID relief funds set aside for them in 2021.

But the state is considering loosening some of the strings that the federal government initially attached to those funds. In particular, under several options outlined Monday by Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, private schools wouldn’t necessarily have to serve a “significant” share of students from low-income families to be eligible for aid, as the Biden administration had required.

Following federal rules, Tennessee recently moved leftover money from the federal emergency assistance program for nonpublic schools to a discretionary COVID education fund managed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee. His office will have more flexibility to figure out a distribution plan that may or may not factor in student poverty levels.

And based on Lee’s discussions with several legislative leaders, their goal is to make sure private schools get a second crack at the funds, instead of using them for public education needs across the state.

“I just think (private school leaders) feel like they weren’t given the opportunity to take advantage of the resources that were put in place for them,” said Sen. Bo Watson, a Hixson Republican and legislative finance leader, who reviewed the issue Monday with other members of Lee’s pandemic relief spending accountability group.

Private school advocates cite hurdles in federal rules

At issue is the federal relief fund for nonpublic schools, through which Congress set aside $2.75 billion in 2021 for states to distribute to private schools as part of a massive pandemic relief package that included $128 billion for K-12 education.

Tennessee received nearly $74 million in 2021 to help private schools rebound from the pandemic — but had awarded only $10.2 million after the deadline for applications passed this spring.

One reason cited by private school leaders: The Biden administration’s distribution rules restricted funding to nonpublic schools that enroll at least 40% of their students from low-income backgrounds — a threshold that has been used as a “measure of significant poverty” when identifying Title I schools under federal law.

The 40% language differed from an earlier relief package approved in 2020 under the Trump administration, which sought to require districts to share education aid with private schools. According to federal data, private schools serve significantly fewer poor households than public schools do.

This year, Tennessee successfully petitioned the U.S. Department of Education to reduce the poverty threshold for eligibility from 40% to 33%, based on the average poverty rate among private schools that participated in the earlier, less restrictive COVID relief package.

But out of 481 eligible private schools, only 44 submitted an application by April 1, and only 22 of those were deemed eligible based on federal poverty data.

Ultimately, the state’s private school participation rate was 5%, compared with 19% for the smaller federal relief program in 2020.

Sarah Wilson, executive director of the Tennessee Association of Independent Schools, said untapped funding shouldn’t be perceived as a lack of interest or need by private schools. Her organization represents 61 out of hundreds of private schools that vary from large, well-funded schools in urban areas to small church-affiliated schools across the state.

“Some of our schools applied, but there were a host of reasons why many did not,” Wilson told Chalkbeat.

Beyond the poverty threshold, some were ineligible because federal law disallowed any private school that received a loan under the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program after December 27, 2020. Still others found the state’s application process “more onerous and difficult” than under the 2020 relief package, she said.

“I really appreciate that policymakers are looking now at what happened with this funding, recognizing that it was originally earmarked for nonpublic schools, and wanting to fulfill that intention if there is interest and need,” Wilson said.

Seeking a new formula for distributing funds

Exactly how Lee’s office would distribute funds to private schools under his emergency fund is still being discussed.

While the governor’s fund has more flexibility than the previous fund that her department oversaw, Schwinn said federal law prohibits using any of the money for private school vouchers, scholarships, or education savings accounts. And all funds must be spent by June 30, 2024.

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn

The commissioner presented four options. One would use the Trump administration’s previous rules for distribution, in which public school districts could count the number of students from low-income families in local private schools and share federal funding proportionally. Other options wouldn’t factor in poverty at all and instead would set allocations per pupil using various percentages.

“We can calculate this in whatever way you all want,” Schwinn told the group, as long as it’s for initiatives that address pre-K through higher education.

Democrats hope the governor, who fought to bring private school vouchers to Tennessee, will still factor in student poverty in any new calculations for private schools. They note that distribution of $2.2 billion to Tennessee public schools under Biden’s American Rescue Plan was based on the number of low-income families served by their districts.

“Our state talks a lot about being fiscally stable, but let’s not confuse fiscal stability with fiscal responsibility,” said Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat. “In our state, we tend to consistently punish people for being poor.”

Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, who serves on the governor’s accountability group, told Chalkbeat that she wants to see data about how the various scenarios could play out. But ultimately, she wants dollars intended for private schools to go to private schools. After all, she said, while all public schools received some federal support during the pandemic, not every private school did.

“A straight per-pupil allocation would be simpler, but we don’t want to be hasty,” said the Signal Mountain Republican, who chaired the House Budget Committee during the recent legislative session.

“We also have to be mindful that we’re dealing with a finite timeline,” she added. “Schools are going to need to submit their applications soon so money can get disbursed.”

You can watch the governor’s financial accountability group’s discussions here. Schwinn’s presentation began at the 1-hour, 18-minute mark.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan seeks $10K fee for access to data on districts’ COVID aid spending plans

2022-11-23T20:00:00+00:00

Michigan’s education system got $6.2 billion in federal COVID relief funding to help school districts mitigate the pandemic’s impact on students.

Now state officials want to charge journalists $10,620 for access to public records that contain detailed, updated information about how districts across the state plan to spend that money.

Chalkbeat requested the data from the Michigan Department of Education in May under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, as part of a reporting collaboration with Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press. Reporters have fought the fee for months on the grounds that the information is a public record that should be made available at no charge.

State officials say the fee — which is considerably higher than what Michigan agencies typically charge for records requests — is needed to cover the cost of screening the data for possible privacy issues. Fulfilling Chalkbeat’s requests without compromising confidential information, they said, “would require careful scrutiny of 42 detailed federal grant applications and hundreds of lines of budget descriptions in one part of the request, and another 2,421 applications and thousands of lines more of budget descriptions in a second part,” along with redaction of any personal information.

Lawyers and advocates for transparency in government say the high MDE fee violates the spirit of freedom of information laws.

“It’s one of the big problems with Michigan FOIA that allows public bodies to hide behind excessive fee demands to keep the public in the dark about its own business,” said Herschel Fink, legal counsel for the Detroit Free Press.

The documents that reporters requested include line-by-line, written explanations of how each district planned to spend COVID relief dollars. The data offers the most up-to-date, detailed picture of the proposed spending — a tool that could help teachers and parents advocate for their priorities and raise concerns if they disagree with their district’s spending plans.

Districts have used the funds to hire social workers, expand summer school, hire tutors, and purchase curriculums, among many other allowable uses.

District officials are required by law to get community input on their spending plans, but they aren’t required to share anything more than rough outlines of the plans they submit to MDE. Some districts have gone to great lengths to publicize details of their intended spending; others have not.

Individuals could try to get the detailed data or other records on their own from MDE or their local district. MDE has signaled that it’s willing to release the documents Chalkbeat requested — specifically, the budget detail page from districts’ applications for COVID relief grants — for individual districts.

A need for up-to-date data

At the core of Chalkbeat’s records request is a public need for current information about how districts plan to spend their federal COVID relief funds. The funds fuel a statewide effort to help address the academic and emotional distress that resulted from the pandemic.

Michigan, like all states, publicly releases extensive information about school spending, but that data lacks details about, for instance, which contractors districts intend to use for specific programs. What’s more, that information is released every January for the previous school year. That means spending recorded in September might not be published until more than a year later.

But parents and educators want to be kept up to date on districts’ spending of COVID relief aid, said Maria Lograsso, a parent, Harper Woods teacher, and organizer with the Michigan Caucus of Rank and File Educators, a group of unionized school workers.

“Not only do parents want to know that their kids are getting what they need, but teachers need to know that educators are getting what they need to help students recover from the pandemic.”

Teachers unions, too, have an interest in this data, because they can use district spending priorities as leverage during contract negotiations. The federal dollars can be used to improve teacher working conditions through, for instance, reducing class sizes or hiring support staff such as school counselors.

“It’s transparency and democracy,” said Toni Coral, president of the Hamtramck Federation of Teachers. “This is federal taxpayer money, and we should have an accounting. I think the information should be available. It seems to me that if you are trying to get people to trust you and to believe in you and to work with you, the information should be released.”

State says it’s concerned about confidentiality

In order to receive federal COVID relief dollars, every district in Michigan — more than 800 in all, including charter schools — has to submit detailed budgets to the state. District officials submit a form online explaining, item by item, how they intend to spend their grant funds.

Some districts proposed spending the money on just a few items — technology or salaries, for example. Others submitted complex budgets including hundreds of lines.

Chalkbeat asked state officials in December 2021 for copies of the initial spending proposals submitted to that point. A department employee emailed Chalkbeat the full data set in a spreadsheet containing more than 30,000 lines.

Each line in the spreadsheet contained, among other data points, the name of the district, a dollar amount of the proposed spending, and an explanation of how the money will be spent.

The data looks roughly like this:

Grant	District	Description	Total Proposed Spend
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	Additional Hours for Certified Teachers to address Learning Loss in extended year programming for 2 school years. ($32.35/hr X 20,000 Hours)	$977,000
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	IPads for student learning and connection with Teachers. (504 x $443 ea)	$223,272
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	Art supplies, glue, paint, brushes, markers, crayons, colored pencils, paper, notebooks, writing utensils, binders, poster board, activity cards, erasers, folders, posterboard, manipulatives, magnetic letters and numbers to support programming and services for EL students at all 8 LAP locations	$20,000

A sample of the requested COVID spending plan data

Data is current as of December 2021.

Source: Michigan Department of Education

The data requested by Chalkbeat and its reporting partners goes beyond other publicly available records of COVID aid spending: It includes the “description” column that contains written explanations of every line item of proposed spending. Typically, the publicly available records group school spending into broad categories, making it difficult to pinpoint spending on specific programs.

MDE says the descriptions are at the center of its concerns about Chalkbeat’s request for updated budgets, because they could contain a student’s name or other personal information that is exempt from public records requests.

In months of working with the data, Chalkbeat has not encountered a student name.

When school districts submit the data to the state, they are instructed not to include student names or other information that the department isn’t allowed to release. MDE officials estimated that it would take an employee making $35 an hour, including benefits, 300 hours to read through the data in case schools didn’t follow those instructions. They later increased that estimate to 807 hours — the equivalent of 100 workdays.

“MDE has worked tirelessly to respond timely and as completely as possible to FOIA requests involving federal COVID dollars for schools,” MDE spokesman Martin Ackley said in an email. “Some requests, such as the one submitted by Chalkbeat, require more time and effort to respond.”

The employee who released the early data to Chalkbeat in 2021 later said that they did not mean to share the description field.

Ackley noted that the state has provided financial information about the COVID relief funds in an allocations portal on its website.

That portal connects to information about how much COVID funding districts received, but not how they plan to spend it. MDE also released written summaries from districts on their spending plans, but those summaries typically didn’t contain any specific spending proposals.

For instance, Lansing Public School District said in its publicly available spending description that it planned to provide “supplemental afterschool programs as well as tutoring, and summer learning for identified students to provide accelerated as well as continued instruction due to COVID-19 learning loss.”

But the district’s detailed budget, which Chalkbeat obtained in December 2021, specified that its extended year programming alone would involve paying teachers for an additional 20,000 hours of work over two years at a cost of $977,000.

In any case, state officials shouldn’t charge money for releasing the updated information, said Lisa McGraw, public affairs manager for the Michigan Press Association, even if it’s allowed by Michigan’s notoriously weak public records law.

“If you’re doling out that kind of money, you should be compiling the information” about how it’s spent, she said. “Taxpayers have a right to know where their money is going, and they shouldn’t have to pay to find that out.”

Jarrett Skorup, director of communications for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank, said the MDE should already have the data in a format that’s ready to release.

“It is bizarre that the Michigan Department of Education could provide similar documents very quickly a few months ago but cannot do so now,” Skorup said. “These are documents or data filled out by school districts and sent to the state. It seems like they should … be compiling this information in a spreadsheet.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

School psychologist, counselor hiring lags nationwide even as student mental health needs soar

2022-11-18T12:00:00+00:00

This story is a partnership with The Associated Press.

Mira Ugwuadu felt anxious and depressed when she returned to her high school in Cobb County, Georgia, last fall after months of remote learning, so she sought help. But her school counselor kept rescheduling their meetings because she had so many students to see.

“I felt helpless and alone,” the 12th grader later said.

Despite an influx of COVID-19 relief money, school districts across the country have struggled to staff up to address students’ mental health needs that have only grown since the pandemic hit.

Among 18 of the country’s largest school districts, 12 started this school year with fewer counselors or psychologists than they had in fall 2019, according to an analysis by Chalkbeat. As a result, many school mental health professionals have caseloads that far exceed recommended limits, according to experts and advocates, and students must wait for urgently needed help.

Some of the extra need for support has been absorbed by social workers — their ranks have grown by nearly 50% since before the pandemic, federal data shows — but they have different training from other mental health professionals and many other duties, including helping families. Districts included in the analysis, which serve a combined 3 million students, started the year with nearly 1,000 unfilled mental health positions.

Hiring challenges are largely to blame, but some school systems have invested relief money in other priorities. The Cobb County district, for one, has not added any new counselors.

“They have so many students that they’re dealing with,” said Mira, 17. “I personally don’t want to blame them. But I also deserve care and support, too.”

A spokesperson for Cobb County Public Schools said school counselor positions are based on a state funding formula, and the district strongly supports more funding.

The Chalkbeat analysis is based on school staffing and vacancy data obtained through open records requests. The 31 largest districts in the U.S. were surveyed, but some did not track or provide data.

Some school systems used federal relief money to add mental health staff, but others did not because they worried about affording them once the aid runs out. Districts have limited time to spend the nearly $190 billion allocated for recovery.

“Here’s this conundrum that we’re in,” said Christy McCoy, the president of the School Social Work Association of America. “It’s like we are trying to put a Band-Aid on something that needs a more comprehensive and integrated approach.”

Hiring challenges for psychologists, counselors

Many of the schools that have wanted to hire more mental health workers simply can’t find them. School psychologist positions have been particularly hard to fill.

Chicago, for example, added 32 school psychologist positions since fall 2019 but ended up with just one additional psychologist on staff this fall. Dozens of positions couldn’t be filled.

Schools in Hillsborough County, Florida eliminated dozens of unfilled psychologist positions, leaving schools with 33 fewer psychologists this fall than pre-pandemic. Houston schools also cut more than a dozen psychologist roles it couldn’t fill before the pandemic. Instead, the district used the money to pay outside providers and hire psychologist interns.

With their extended training, school psychologists are relied upon to provide intensive one-on-one counseling and help determine whether students are at risk for suicide.

In Maryland, a shortage of psychologists at Montgomery County Public Schools has kept the short-staffed department focused on crisis intervention and providing legally mandated services like special education assessments, said Christina Connolly-Chester, director of psychological services. That has meant they cannot keep up with other, less urgent counseling services.

“If that psychologist has more schools because there are vacancies and they’re not able to spend as much time in their assigned schools, then things like counseling go away,” she said.

The district sought to hire staff to address increased student needs such as anxiety, depression and struggles with conflict management, but still had 30 vacant psychologist positions, a district official said this month.

Even before the pandemic, some schools struggled to find psychologists. New practitioners have not been entering the field fast enough, and others have been switching to telehealth or private practices with higher pay and often better working conditions.

“We can’t afford to pay professionals enough to make it a desirable position,” said Sharon Hoover, a psychologist who co-directs the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland.

Counselor staffing has been a challenge for some districts, too, with nine of the large districts down counselors this year, while another nine saw increases.

Where hiring has been toughest, schools have turned to alternatives. In Hawaii, which had 31 vacant counselor positions and 20 vacant psychologist roles at the start of the year, the state has trained educators to spot signs that a student is in distress — an increasingly common practice — and pays a private company to provide tele-mental health services.

To help with student counseling, the state also employs about 300 behavioral health specialists — a position created before the pandemic partly in response to a longstanding school psychologist shortage, said Annie Kalama, the department official who oversees student support services.

“We’re trying to attack it from every angle,” she said.

It isn’t just hiring challenges that have led to smaller-than-expected staffing increases. Some school systems spent most of their federal aid on more lasting investments, such as technology or building repairs. And many opted not to add new mental health workers at all.

In the Chalkbeat analysis, half of the 18 large districts budgeted for fewer counselor or psychologist positions this school year than they did in fall 2019.

In April, just 4 in 10 districts reported hiring new staffers to address students’ mental health needs, according to a national survey.

“For all the talk about mental health, the actual money they’re spending on it is not that high,” said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University that tracks school spending. School districts only planned to spend about 2% of the largest round of federal COVID aid on mental health hiring, according to the group’s analysis of more than 5,000 district spending plans.

Schools have added social workers

One bright spot in the school mental health landscape, though, is the increase in social workers.

Montgomery County in Maryland, Gwinnett County in Georgia, and Orange, Broward, and Palm Beach counties in Florida all started the year with dozens more social workers than they had in fall 2019. Chicago added the most — nearly 150 additional social workers — in part due to staffing promises in the latest teachers union contract.

The Chalkbeat analysis echoes national data collected by the White House that show the number of school social workers was up 48% this fall compared with before the pandemic, while the number of school counselors was up a more modest 12% and the count of school psychologists inched up 4%.

In Houston, staffing increases meant nearly every school started this fall with a counselor or social worker.

Newly hired social worker Natalie Rincon is able to meet one-on-one with students who are in crisis and teach other students calming strategies, such as tracing their hand with a finger while breathing.

Still, need often outstrips capacity at Rincon’s school, where many students are refugees or recent immigrants coping with trauma. She often has to prioritize helping students with urgent issues, leaving less time to check in on others.

Natalie Rincon, a social worker, has seen the benefits of having a fuller mental health team at her Houston elementary school.

“I want to be able to meet with a kindergartner just to talk about how they’re feeling,” Rincon said. “Those are the kind of things that I think slip through the cracks.”

And in some schools, the social worker doesn’t have any backup.

As the sole mental health professional at a charter school in Buffalo, New York, social worker Danielle Dylik provides counseling to more than 40 students most weeks. She also assists with discipline issues and is setting up a food pantry and clothes bank for families.

But as just one person, she knows she can’t help every student who needs it.

“There’s just not enough hours in the school day,” she said.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Annie Ma is a reporter for The Associated Press.

Schools across the U.S. have turned to Paper’s online tutoring. Some worry it’s falling short.

2022-11-17T16:45:15+00:00

Officials in Columbus City Schools were looking for a solution last year to some of the educational fallout of the pandemic — and they thought they found it in Paper, a popular virtual tutoring company that says it offers high-quality support for students at a lower price point.

The district spent $913,000 in COVID relief funds for Paper to provide its middle and high school students with access to 24/7, on-demand tutoring.

But Columbus quietly cut ties with the company in September because too few students were using the tool. District records obtained by Chalkbeat show that less than 8% of students with access logged on last school year. Half of those students used it just once. In some schools, not a single student logged on.

“I’ve had personal experience with it with my student,” school board president Jennifer Adair said of her rising seventh grader at a June meeting. “It was frustrating, and annoying, and she didn’t want to use it again.”

School districts across the country have spent millions in COVID relief dollars to purchase services from virtual tutoring companies to try to plug pandemic learning gaps. Paper, an eight-year-old company based in Montreal, has emerged as one of the most popular players in the market. It holds multi-million dollar contracts with some of the nation’s largest school districts and has splashy billboards in cities like Tampa and Chicago.

But educators and officials in districts that were among the first to contract with Paper say its text-based tutoring service often frustrates the students who need the most help, isn’t easily used by the youngest students, and can go unused altogether.

Philip Cutler, the co-founder and CEO of Paper, says the company has made several changes to respond to student and district feedback, with more in the works. Paper is piloting a voice notes feature aimed at helping younger children and English learners more easily use the platform. And the company has taken several steps to try to boost usage.

At a time when many students need academic help, Cutler says his company has proven it can deliver that on a large scale.

“It would be fantastic if we could have a tutor who sits next to a student for eight hours a day while they’re in class and helps re-explain everything to them,” Cutler said in a November interview. “Are we able to do that for 60 million students? I don’t think so. We need to make sure that there is something that actually can be applied to millions of students, that they can take advantage of.”

Still, schools’ reliance on programs like Paper worries observers like Allison Socol, a vice president at the education civil rights group The Education Trust who wrote a guide to spotting quality tutoring programs. Even with staffing challenges, she says, schools can do better.

“I am purposely not going to call it tutoring, because it’s not,” said Socol, of on-demand virtual help. “It doesn’t mean it’s not useful to some students. But is it useful at the scale that we need, and is it worth the amount of money that a lot of districts are spending? My gut says no, and a lot of the emerging data also says no.”

Why on-demand tutoring, and Paper, took off during pandemic

Paper traces its origins back to when Cutler saw firsthand how private tutoring can fuel academic inequities. While attending a teaching program at McGill University, Cutler ran a tutoring business that catered to children of wealthy families. “The other 90% needed the help the most but didn’t have the resources at home,” he said in an interview last year, “and no one was serving that side of the market.”

Cutler co-founded Paper in 2014, shortly after he graduated, and within four years the company had some district clients. But Paper really took off during the pandemic.

Schools, flush with COVID cash, wanted to offer tutoring to their students, but often struggled to staff and schedule those programs. Many districts couldn’t find enough teachers, who were often too exhausted and stressed to tutor for extra pay. And in a tight labor market, other adults were hard to recruit, too.

Paper offered a solution: It found and hired the tutors, and connected them to students whenever they needed help. Paper said its on-demand model could help schools reach struggling students who had to work or care for siblings after school, or who didn’t have a parent at home to help them with assignments.

“Paper aims to address the inequities facing all students, especially those from marginalized groups,” the company said.

Paper says it now works with 400 districts across the U.S. and Canada. Among its clients are four of the nation’s 10 largest districts: Los Angeles Unified, Clark County in Nevada, and Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties in Florida. Other big clients include the school districts in Boston; Prince William County, Virginia; and Jefferson County, Kentucky. Together, those contracts are worth $24 million and counting, records obtained by Chalkbeat show. (Los Angeles’ contract has yet to be finalized, Cutler said.)

Paper also holds statewide contracts worth $12 million total to provide virtual tutoring to students in grades 3-12 across Mississippi and to high schoolers in Tennessee.

Here’s how the service works: Students log on to Paper, type in a question, and get matched with a tutor. Students chat with the tutor over text message, and they can draw a problem on a virtual whiteboard. But the student can’t see or hear the tutor in real time, since there’s no live audio or video.

Even Paper’s marketing materials illustrate why that setup can be hard for some kids.

In transcripts of real tutoring sessions Paper provides to potential clients as “exemplary,” the company includes a session in which an elementary schooler needs help with basic math.

“I need help taking away,” the student types.

The tutor asks if the student knows why they’re having a hard time with subtraction.

“10000 - 0872,” the child responds. Drawing on the virtual whiteboard, the student reaches an incorrect answer: 2666.

“Can you explain what you did on the top with the 0’s?” the tutor asks. The student struggles to explain, starting with, “well I crossed it out.”

“Yeah! Do you know why you had to do that?” the tutor asked.

The student then left the session before getting guidance. But Paper noted they “left a glowing review for the tutor.”

Lucetta Holbert with her 14-year-old son, Zion Holbert, inside Berwick Alternative K-8 School in Columbus. Zion used Paper last year to get feedback on a writing assignment, but did not use it again.

Costs balloon when few students use Paper’s online tutoring

In Columbus, 14-year-old Zion Holbert used Paper last year to get feedback on a writing assignment comparing themes in “The Hunger Games” books to historical events. He found the site confusing at first, but eventually he figured out how to upload his work and he took some of the tutor’s editing suggestions.

His mother, Lucetta Holbert, appreciated how quickly the feedback came in. “It was really nice because I’m not a really good writer,” she said, “so that took the pressure off me to try to figure out how to do all this comparing and contrasting.”

But Zion never tried Paper again, though he was struggling with some math concepts, like fractions, that he learned when school was remote. When he wanted math help, he’d stay after school to review problems with his homeroom teacher or visit the library to work with a volunteer tutor.

His advice to other students? Paper can be helpful for English class, “if you’re stuck and you got work you want someone to read and you’re at home.” But if you have a more complicated question, seek out a teacher at school. “In person, you can just show them and they can help you,” Zion said.

One of Paper’s biggest selling points is that districts can offer unlimited virtual tutoring to many students at a fixed price. A Chalkbeat review of 13 recent district contracts show the cost per student can range from $21 to $183, though the median price was around $40. (Cutler says rates vary based on district size, contract length, and how much help the district needs to get started.)

But when students like Zion don’t return to the service or don’t use Paper at all, the true per-student cost is much higher.

Zion Holbert, 14, studies at Berwick Alternative K-8 School in Columbus.

Paper charged Columbus schools $38 per student for tutoring access, but district officials noted that the cost ballooned to $446 per student who actually used the service.

Santa Ana Unified in California paid Paper over $1.1 million last year to provide access to nearly 41,000 students. But just over 1,000 students logged on for tutoring or essay help from December 2021 to May, district records show, ultimately costing the district nearly $1,100 per child. (The district is no longer using Paper.)

Cutler says he believes Paper’s product is worth the cost when the number of help sessions roughly equals the number of students with access to the tool. Even by that generous standard — which can count the same student multiple times — the company often falls short.

In Hillsborough County, Florida, around 16,000 students used Paper from September 2021 to this September, or just under 14% of the middle and high schoolers with access. Those students logged around 47,000 tutoring sessions and essay reviews, district officials said — less than half of what Paper had projected. The usage was so off that the company ended up owing the school district over half a million dollars.

Usage looked similar in Palm Beach County, Florida. Some 104,000 middle and high schoolers had access to Paper, and they completed around 53,000 tutoring and essay review sessions last school year, district records show. That was within the projection in the district’s contract, but under what the company considers a good deal.

But school board members there had another concern: students from high-poverty schools used Paper less than their peers at more affluent schools.

Paper says usage rates improve when the company and district make concerted efforts to reach out to teachers, students, and families to tell them about the service. But others say the numbers reflect a problem baked into Paper’s opt-in model.

“It’s not necessarily the virtual part of it,” said Socol of The Education Trust. “Online homework help puts the responsibility on the student to say: ‘I don’t understand this individual question on my homework, let me reach out to a potentially random adult who I don’t have a relationship with.’”

Research released last month seems to back that up. In California’s Aspire charter school network, only 1 in 5 of the middle and high school students in the study used Paper in spring 2021. But higher-achieving students were almost twice as likely to use the platform as students who’d gotten at least one D or F the prior semester — the exact students the charter network had hired Paper to help.

More struggling students did try Paper when school leaders urged them and their parents to do so, but “take-up remained low,” the researchers wrote.

“If you expect them to bring their questions to the tutoring, that’s very difficult, too, because many students don’t quite know what they understand or don’t,” said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Brown University who co-authored the study. “As a strategy for supporting students in need, it’s not a good strategy.”

Jillian Eichenauer, a middle school math teacher at an Aspire school just south of Los Angeles, has seen that in her classroom. Last year, she had her eighth graders redo problems they got wrong on their tests with Paper, but she didn’t turn to the tool if they were struggling with a concept, like writing an equation.

“I usually try to direct them to do that when it’s like a check for your answer, rather than get help,” Eichenauer said. “Some of them require re-teaching, which Paper is not very beneficial for.”

Paper’s shortcomings for young kids, English learners

Young students and students learning English as a new language have an especially hard time using Paper, educators say, though the company markets itself as being accessible to both. Paper employs tutors who can speak Spanish, French, and Mandarin, which has been a draw for many district clients.

But in several places, usage was especially low for those two groups of students. In Santa Ana Unified, a mostly Latino district where 40% of students are English learners, just four students used Paper in Spanish, data provided by the district for last school year show. No first or second graders logged on, and only two third graders did.

In Palm Beach County, only about 1% of tutoring and essay help sessions were conducted in a language other than English last school year, though 11% of students who had access were English learners.

Several districts, including Boston, Clark County, and Los Angeles, are paying Paper to use with children as young as 5, though experts in early literacy say kindergartners and first graders typically aren’t able to read and respond to a virtual tutor over text-based chat. Struggling readers in second grade are likely to have trouble, too.

Amanda Samples, the executive director of academic support and school improvement for DeSoto County schools in Mississippi, which uses Paper in grades 3-12 through the state’s initiative, says that when she reviews tutoring session logs, she can tell some younger students don’t realize the virtual tutor is a real person.

A student “might say: ‘I need help with vocabulary,’ and so the tutor will ask a question back, and then they may just not respond,” Samples said.

In Chicago’s west suburbs, middle school teacher Hannah Nolan-Spohn has used Paper to help English learners practice their conversation skills. But some have found the platform challenging without a voice option. The speech-to-text feature hasn’t helped much, either.

“The bot doesn’t always understand what it is that they’re trying to say,” Nolan-Spohn said, “and then they get frustrated.”

Paper officials have acknowledged the challenges English learners and younger students might face with the platform.

Paper makes changes as more schools seek online tutoring

Paper has acknowledged some of its shortcomings and says it’s working to improve.

“We realized for the younger students, in particular, they don’t necessarily have the ability to sit in a live chat,” Cutler told Chalkbeat earlier this summer, acknowledging that setup can be challenging for students with disabilities and English learners, too. “They’re just learning a language.”

As a fix, the company introduced a voice notes feature in Los Angeles’ schools this fall. It allows students to upload a recording of themselves speaking, but they still can’t have a live two-way conversation with a tutor. Cutler said it’s shown promise so far, and students who use the voice memos are more likely to return to the service. Paper intends to test it out in Boston before making it widely available next year.

Many virtual tutoring competitors now have live audio and video options, but Cutler says Paper doesn’t plan to change that part of its model because student focus groups haven’t shown a demand for that.

The company says it’s also stepped up efforts to make students and families aware of its services, running contests with prizes for schools that use Paper a lot and hiring staff who train teachers and demonstrate the tool for students.

Asked why students from high-poverty schools used Paper less, Cutler said that challenge is not unique to Paper. The company has worked with some districts, such as Clark County, to launch virtual tutoring in high-need schools first.

“What we need to do, and we are doing, is really focusing a lot of the messaging on: How do you support students who don’t really trust the system?” Cutler said this summer. “They are not the first ones to say, ‘Hey I think this is going to help me.’”

In the meantime, school districts are deciding how long they should give Paper to prove its worth as the deadline for spending federal COVID funds looms. Earlier this month, for example, the Hillsborough County school board renewed its contract for 10 months at a significantly reduced rate after raising concerns about low usage rates. District officials said they’d drop Paper if the plan to get more students logging on didn’t work.

“This is a lot of money,” Superintendent Addison Davis said, adding he wanted “to make certain that we’re getting the return on investment.”

How effective Paper is at helping students also remains an open question. The Aspire study found that when students and families got extra nudges to use Paper, and did, those students were 4 percentage points more likely to pass all their classes. Paper is involved in other ongoing research, but there’s not much else to go on for now.

Cutler maintains that Paper is “a critical piece to recovery.”

“I would 100% disagree with the fact that it’s not a solution that can address learning losses,” he said. “It absolutely is. And it’s being used that way by districts across the country.”

Leaders in districts like Mississippi’s Jefferson County schools are banking on it. Superintendent Adrian Hammitte jumped on the chance to use Paper through the state’s initiative.

“Coming from a school district with not many resources,” he said, “with it being free and offering 24/7 support, I was pretty much sold.”

Elsewhere in Mississippi, districts are using Paper to approximate “high-dosage tutoring” — a highly effective strategy in which students attend multiple tutoring sessions per week, during the school day. Cutler and the company’s marketing materials say Paper can be used in a high-dosage way, though its model is missing key components of that research-backed strategy, such as providing students with a consistent tutor.

Others say the kind of help Paper offers isn’t enough to catch up struggling students — and the fact that so many districts have turned to it raises questions about the country’s capacity to truly help the students who need it most.

Tony Solina, who oversees 16 Aspire schools in California, says it’s unrealistic to think Paper is going to “close the learning loss gap” the way most schools use it. His strategy to do that was to make sure the schools he manages had an after-school program staffed by educators who build relationships with students and their teachers.

“That’s, to me, the gold standard,” he said. “I don’t believe any online system is going to do better than or trump that.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

NYC won’t expand prekindergarten for 3-year-olds next year

2022-11-16T23:51:43+00:00

Mayor Eric Adams is not planning to expand New York City’s free prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds next year, as city agencies are facing calls to cut back on spending, education department officials confirmed Wednesday.

City officials are planning to divert $568 million in federal COVID relief money that had been earmarked for 3-K expansion over the next two fiscal years to use elsewhere for the education department, Emma Vadehra, the school system’s chief operations officer, said during a Wednesday City Council hearing. Instead, funding for 3-K will hold steady from this year, she said, allowing the education department to meet “a very large portion” of savings goals set out by Adams, which he’s also required of other city agencies.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio had planned to use stimulus money to create 60,000 seats for the city’s 3-year-olds and make 3-K universal by September 2023. But the Adams administration has stepped back from that promise.

As of this fall, the city had planned to open 55,000 3-K seats, for a total budget of $711 million. About two thirds of that is covered by stimulus dollars, according to a City Hall spokesperson. But at the same time, about 36,500 children have enrolled.

A spokesperson for City Hall did not detail how officials plan to repurpose the money intended for 3-K, except for saying that it will go toward “central costs” at the education department.

Under de Blasio, city officials planned to use the largest pot of the education department’s $7 billion in COVID stimulus dollars on expanding preschool for 3-year-olds. But the former mayor never laid out how the city would pay for the program once those temporary dollars ran out. Neither has Adams, setting up the city for a $376 million funding shortfall for 3-K by July 2025. That sum has raised concerns among budget watchdogs, including the city and state comptrollers.

Cutting back on an expansion of 3-K could help the city avoid a fiscal cliff for that program. However, repurposing those stimulus dollars for other initiatives could still require the city to either find more money for those additional services or make cuts.

Several local lawmakers and advocates expressed anger over the city’s decision to halt 3-K expansion and said that there was still demand for seats in various pockets of the city.

Asked multiple times during Wednesday’s hearing when the city would make 3-K universal, department officials did not provide a direct answer, instead pointing out that thousands of seats have not been filled.

“The issue is making sure we have those seats as close as possible to families who need them,” said James Morgano, manager of expansion at the city’s Division of Early Childhood Education. He said the city is conducting an assessment of where those seats should be.

Brooklyn Council member Lincoln Restler questioned why he hears from so many families in Greenpoint who have been unable to find a 3-K seat. Restler blamed lack of demand on insufficient outreach to families from the education department.

“If this administration is not prepared to put the funding in, then I strongly encourage my colleagues in the council to step up and make this the priority that it needs to be,” Restler said during the hearing. “Working families and our youth depend on high-quality early childhood education, and if you all aren’t prepared to make it happen, then we need to take it into our own hands.”

Gregory Brender, public policy director for the Day Care Council, said they see “incredible demand” from parents in neighborhoods where the city has expanded 3-K.

“It would be devastating to a lot of neighborhoods to know that they’re not gonna have the opportunity to see 3-K expanded, as has been in other parts of the city,” Brender said.

In a note to superintendents on Wednesday discussing plans for 3-K, department officials wrote that the Adams administration has “emphasized the importance of continuing to work with our city, state and federal partners to develop a proposal for early childhood education resources“ for when stimulus dollars run out.

The plan to pare back on expansion is another example of how early childhood education programming is changing under Adams, who campaigned on focusing more on “birth-to-5” programming. During Adams’ tenure so far, the city has come under fire for failing to pay preschool providers. Officials have also faced pushback for plans to reassign hundreds of early childhood workers who provided extra instructional and social-emotional support to classrooms serving the city’s youngest learners.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students

2022-11-15T10:00:00+00:00

This article was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist.

For months, Beth Petersen paid acquaintances to take her son to school — money she sorely needed.

They’d lost their apartment, her son bouncing between relatives and friends while she hotel-hopped. As hard as she tried to keep the 13-year-old at his school, they finally had to switch districts.

Under federal law, Petersen’s son had a right to free transportation — and to remain in the school he attended at the time he lost permanent housing.

But no one told Petersen that.

“They should have been sending a bus for him. … He’s missed so much school I can’t believe it,” Petersen said. “And school is stability.”

Petersen was unaware of a federal law that would’ve allowed her son to remain in his district while they experienced houselessness.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of district-level federal education data suggests roughly 300,000 students entitled to essential rights reserved for homeless students have slipped through the cracks, unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them.

Some 2,400 districts — from regions synonymous with economic hardship to big cities and prosperous suburbs — did not report having even one homeless student despite levels of financial need that make those figures improbable.

And many more districts are likely undercounting the number of homeless students they do identify. In nearly half of states, tallies of student homelessness bear no relationship with poverty, a sign of just how inconsistent the identification of kids with unstable housing can be.

The reasons include a federal law so little-known that people charged with implementing it often fail to follow the rules; nearly non-existent enforcement of the law by federal and state governments; and funding so meager that districts have little incentive to survey whether students have stable housing.

“It’s a largely invisible population,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education. “The national conversation on homelessness is focused on single adults who are very visible in large urban areas. It is not focused on children, youth and families. It is not focused on education.”

Losing a home can be a critical turning point in a child’s life. That’s why schools are required to provide extra support.

Nationwide, homeless students graduate at lower rates than average, blunting their opportunities for stable jobs and increasing the risk of continued housing insecurity in adulthood.

The gap is often stark: In 18 states, graduation rates for students who experienced homelessness lagged more than 20 percentage points behind the overall rate in both 2017 and 2018.

The academic cost is not equally shared. Black and Latino children experience homelessness at disproportionate rates, Public Integrity’s analysis showed. Nationally, American Indian or Alaska Native students were also over-represented, as were students with disabilities.

Until recently, it was not clear from federal records which students were hit hardest by housing instability. Data disclosed in U.S. Department of Education reports revealed nothing about the race or ethnicity of students recognized by their school districts as homeless.

That changed in the 2019-20 school year when the federal government for the first time made public the race and ethnicity breakdowns for individual school districts. The pattern that emerged is a story of the country’s sharp inequities, which put some families at far higher risk of homelessness than others.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, first enacted in 1987 and expanded in 2001, requires that districts take specific actions to help unstably housed students complete school. Districts must waive enrollment requirements, such as immunization forms, that could keep kids out of the classroom. They must refer families to health care and housing services. And they must provide transportation so children can remain in the school they attended before they became homeless, even if they’re now outside the attendance boundaries.

Earl Edwards, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Education and Human Development, argues that McKinney-Vento was premised on an idea still pervasive in the policy debate on homelessness: Like a tornado that levels towns at random, housing misfortune has an equal chance of afflicting anyone, regardless of who they are.

In the 1980s, that rhetoric was a potent argument in favor of expanded federal support for homeless services. It was also wrong.

The McKinney-Vento Act started as an inadequate policy

The McKinney Act — later renamed — took shape at a time when the Reagan administration, if it acknowledged homeless people at all, regarded them as having chosen a life on urban skid rows, said Maria Foscarinis, who helped write the law.

Foscarinis, the founder of the National Homelessness Law Center, reframed homelessness as a broader structural problem impacting families, people of all races, even suburbanites. The outcome was a race-neutral solution, despite data at the time that went counter to that theory.

Foscarinis said the law’s architects knew it was inadequate and planned to follow it with homeless prevention programs and housing. But they faced stiff resistance. It would have been better to include race-conscious language tracking the demographics of homeless children, she added, but doing so could have jeopardized the entire effort.

“Had we done that, it would have torpedoed the whole thing, which would have hurt Black communities even more,” she said. “Then, we would have nothing at all.”

Figures now available down to the school district show the consequences of homelessness policy that doesn’t address race directly.

Nationally, Black students were 15% of public school enrollment but 27% of homeless students in 2019-20. In 36 states and Washington, D.C., the rate of homelessness among Black students was at least twice the rate of all other students that year.

Boston College’s Edwards said the disconnect lies between the reality of housing inequality and the policies intended to address it.

“If you don’t recognize that Black people, during the time when you were establishing the actual policy, were disproportionately experiencing homelessness” — and that housing discrimination, urban renewal, blockbusting and other systemic factors pushing Black people out of housing were key drivers — “then you make a policy, and the policy doesn’t have anything in place to prevent those things from persisting,” Edwards said.

And under-identification of homelessness could impact Black students more than peers of other races.

In interviews with Black students who experienced homelessness while enrolled in Los Angeles County public school districts, Edwards found that many distrusted school personnel, who underestimated their academic ability, sent them to the principal’s office for the smallest perceived slights, and threatened to call child protective services.

As a result, Edwards found, many students went unidentified under McKinney-Vento because they feared that sharing their situation would only make things worse. They paid for transit passes out of pocket. They were forced out of their home districts. They navigated college admissions alone. If they were lucky, they found mentors outside of the school system.

Those experiences aren’t an accident, Edwards argues, but the product of historical patterns. For example: “Calling child protective services would not be a severe threat to Black students if racial disparities within the institution itself were less pronounced.”

Beneath the race-neutral veneer of McKinney-Vento, American Indian or Alaska Native students and Latino students also experience housing instability at higher rates than their peers in the majority of states.

In Capistrano Unified, a 44,000-student school district in southern California, the rate of homelessness among Latino students was roughly 24% in recent school years compared to about 2% among the rest of the student body.

“It’s not anything that we’ve really done research on, so I wouldn’t even be able to speculate” as to why, said Stacy Yogi, executive director of state and federal programs for the district.

Across California, Latino students are 56% of public school enrollment but 74% of homeless students.

A 2020 report from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Black and Latino students who experience homelessness in the state are more than one and a half times as likely to be suspended from school as their non-homeless peers. They also miss more school days and are less prepared for college.

Public Integrity’s analysis also found that students with disabilities have higher rates of homelessness than the rest of their peers in every state except Mississippi, suggesting that a significant share of students who already require additional support attend school uncertain of where they will sleep that night.

“They’re experiencing trauma, and trauma has a pretty significant impact,” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a policy and advocacy group focused on youth homelessness. “You have to navigate an overly complicated system, and it’s this competition for limited resources where young people and children and families are just inherently disadvantaged.”

EJ Valez, who has limited vision and requires large-print materials for reading and braille instruction, was among them.

Valez experienced housing instability for most of his youth, bouncing between homes and schools in the Bronx and Reading, Pennsylvania.

“I’m surprised I made it out of school,” he said.

As a teenager, he said, he couch-surfed with friends and acquaintances after he became estranged from his family.

“Somehow I could retain information, but at no point in my childhood before full-on adulthood was there ever actual stability,” said Valez, now a student at Albright College in Pennsylvania and a member of the National Network for Youth’s National Youth Advisory Council. “No one cares about classes if we don’t know where we’re going to put our heads at night.”

That, he said, is why extra help from schools is so critical.

Hidden homelessness in America

It might seem like common sense to assume that where more children experience poverty, more will experience homelessness, too.

But that’s not what the data from school districts show. One of the most surprising patterns we found is that reported homelessness among students didn’t mirror poverty in 24 states.

The finding runs counter to a growing body of empirical evidence supporting the connection between poverty and housing instability. Children born below 50% of the poverty line had a higher probability of eviction than higher-income peers, lower-income households are more likely to experience forced mobility, and renters who are forced to move end up in higher-poverty neighborhoods than renters who move voluntarily.

“There should be a stronger relationship between homelessness and poverty,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, “and the fact that there’s not supports that there’s under-identification taking place.”

Districts can tell teachers and staff to look for common signs of housing instability among students — fatigue, unmet health needs, marked changes in behavior. But those aren’t always apparent.

If they’re following the law, districts will survey families so they can self-identify as homeless. But some parents fear that acknowledging their housing struggles could prompt the government to take their kids away.

And then there’s the gulf between what people commonly think of as homeless and the more expansive definition Congress uses for students. Living in a shelter, on the streets, in a vehicle or in a motel paid for by the government or a charitable organization are included, but that’s not all.

More than 70% of children eligible for services were forced by economic need to move out of their homes — with or without their family — and in with relatives or friends, a practice that the U.S. Department of Education defines as “doubled up.”

Research on doubled-up students shows there’s good reason to provide them with help: They earned lower grades, for example, and were less likely to graduate on time.

In Riverside County, California, Beth Petersen’s son met the definition of doubled up for months, having lived temporarily with her sister and with friends.

Only Petersen didn’t know it at the time.

Eventually, the two found housing outside the Temecula Valley Unified School District her son had attended for years. He switched districts, keeping up with the schoolwork but struggling to make friends.

Then a friend of Petersen’s who works at a charter school told her that her son had the right to re-enroll in the Temecula Valley schools because the McKinney-Vento law allows students to stay in the same school they attended before becoming homeless.

In early September, Petersen moved with her son into a two-bedroom apartment — still outside the district boundaries — paid for by a homeless prevention organization and shared with another family. Under federal law, her son is considered homeless because they live in transitional housing.

Petersen re-enrolled her son in Temecula Valley Unified but problems persisted. She said she pleaded with the district for weeks, trying to secure bus rides for the teenager. The district never responded to her emails, she said. He ultimately missed a month of classes, Petersen estimated, because she could not afford to continue paying acquaintances to transport her son every day.

The California Department of Education intervened in late September to ensure her son received transportation.

“This has been a teachable moment for the district and there are protocols and … barriers that have been removed to ensure the law is met,” an employee at the state agency wrote Petersen in an email.

A statement provided by Temecula Valley Unified in response to detailed questions regarding the Petersens said the district “does everything in its power to support our McKinney-Vento families experiencing homelessness” and has “highly responsive site and district teams,” but declined to comment further.

Experts think students like Petersen’s son are among those most likely to go unidentified and unassisted because their families don’t realize they qualify for help and schools too often fail to fill the information gap.

Petersen’s son missed over a month of classes due to transportation issues with Temecula Valley Unified.

When that happens, “we’re not even including most of our kids who are experiencing homelessness in the definition of who’s homeless,” said Charlotte Kinzley, supervisor of homeless and highly mobile services for the Minneapolis Public Schools. “So we haven’t even named the problem.”

In Minneapolis, the reported graduation rate for homeless students is at least 26 percentage points below the rate for all students. The district introduced programs in the last few years to help schools find more students experiencing housing instability and connect them with assistance. Lesson plans for teachers help high school students understand if they qualify.

Across Minnesota, districts generally reported homeless rates that loosely mirrored trends in free- or reduced-price lunch eligibility, suggesting some consistency in identification.

“It’s not a matter of getting the right count or getting the numbers,” said Melissa Winship, a Minneapolis schools counselor who works with students experiencing homelessness. “It’s a matter of those students and families having those supports and resources that they deserve.”

Data on student homelessness is collected by districts and funneled to the federal government by states, which can choose to leave out any districts that did not report having any homeless students. Our data adds those excluded districts back. We assume they identified no homeless students, since they’re not in federal data.

Our analysis focused on non-charter districts in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. In addition to comparing poverty and reported homelessness, we applied a common benchmark used by education researchers and some public education officials — that one of every 20 students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches experience homelessness under the federal definition.

In each school year we analyzed, more than 8,000 districts did not meet the one-in-20 guideline.

DeSoto County, Mississippi, for instance, identified fewer than 300 homeless students, according to state records Public Integrity reviewed. Its share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches suggests the district has three times the number it reported.

That’s not the only reason to suspect an undercount. In 2018, local landlords filed more than 4,000 eviction cases, according to an estimate from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

By comparison, Mississippi’s Vicksburg Warren School District identified about as many homeless students as DeSoto despite having less than half as many children eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

The DeSoto County schools did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s possible that some school districts genuinely have fewer homeless students than this benchmark predicts. But multiple researchers told us that they see the one-in-20 threshold as a conservative estimate.

J.J. Cutuli, a senior research scientist at Nemours Children’s Health System, said the analysis bolsters the anecdotal experiences of school district staff, shelter personnel, and people who’ve lived through periods of homelessness.

“You’re giving us a clue as to the magnitude of this problem. And that’s really the important part here,” he said.

The University of Michigan’s Erb-Downward said the reason numbers are critical is because “we, somehow, as a society, have agreed that it is OK for the level of poverty and instability that children experience, from a housing perspective, to exist.”

“If we don’t actively track that, and have a conversation about what the level [of homelessness] really is, I don’t think we’re being forced to actually look at that decision that we’ve made societally,” she said. “And we’re not really being forced to say, ‘Is this actually what makes sense? Is this actually what we want?’”

Why tracking homeless children in America is an ‘uphill battle’

The federal government, state education departments, and families have few options to hold districts accountable if they fail to properly identify or provide assistance for students experiencing homelessness.

The U.S. Department of Education delegates enforcement to states. States where school districts fail to follow the law are subject to increased monitoring, but the federal agency would not say how often that happens. A spokesman said only that the agency “engages in monitoring and compliance activities that can include investigating alleged non-compliance.”

Public Integrity reviewed dozens of lawsuits in which families and advocacy groups alleged that school districts denied students rights that are guaranteed under the federal McKinney-Vento law.

Families experiencing homelessness have sometimes prevailed in their standoffs with education agencies, winning reforms like agreements to train school personnel in the law and, in one case, a toll-free number for parents and children to contact with questions about their rights.

“There’s not really a ton of capacity for actually investigating and dealing with these complaints,” said Katie Meyer Scott, senior youth attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center. “We have a problem where there’s not necessarily an investment in enforcement at either the federal or state level.”

As an extreme last resort, the U.S. Department of Education can cut funding — a step officials are loath to take because that would ultimately harm the very students the agency wanted to help. The agency said it has never penalized a state in this manner.

A 2014 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that eight of the 20 school districts its staff interviewed acknowledged they had problems identifying homeless students. The watchdog agency found that the U.S. Department of Education had “no plan to ensure adequate oversight of all states,” with similar gaps in state monitoring of school districts.

State audits in California, Washington, and New York have also made the case that many school districts fail to identify a significant number of students who qualify for the rights guaranteed under federal law. Advocacy groups and researchers, too, have surfaced examples.

In Michigan, state Department of Education guidelines call for an investigation if school districts identify fewer than 10% of low-income students as homeless. Erb-Downward found that all but a handful of Detroit schools fell below this threshold in the 2017-18 school year.

Public Integrity’s analysis points to similar problems. Detroit’s public school district, the largest district in the state, identified 255 fewer homeless students than the Kalamazoo Public Schools in 2018-19, despite having four times as many students and a much higher poverty rate.

Detroit school superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a statement that the district’s efforts to improve in recent years include adding full-time staff to its homeless student office, a residency questionnaire with its student enrollment form, referral systems, and public information about available services.

Homeless student numbers have tripled in the past several years, Vitti said. But, he added, “We are aware there is still an undercount.”

Detroit’s public school district, under Superintendent Vitti, have sought to improve its count of students experiencing homelessness.

A statewide review this year identified 120 Michigan school districts, roughly 20%, in need of additional monitoring, department spokesman Martin Ackley said. The state is asking those districts to provide evidence that they are in compliance with federal law.

The state expects to finish the reviews this winter and will provide technical support to districts struggling to meet federal requirements.

Districts in other parts of the country willing to explain likely undercounts offer a variety of reasons.

In the Chester-Upland School District outside of Philadelphia, interim homeless liaison Dana Bowser said many families consult district staff as a last resort when they can’t find a solution to their housing troubles on their own. Language barriers make some parents reluctant to come forward, she added.

Florida’s Broward County Public Schools described struggles to overcome limited funding, stigma, and fear of immigration services as “skyrocketing home prices and lack of regulation around rental fees have created an unfortunate climate in which more individuals and families are facing homelessness, including middle-class income families.”

And in the Yuma Union High School District along Arizona’s borders with both California and Mexico, where our benchmark predicted more than five times the number of homeless students than was reported in the 2019-20 school year, school officials said they do not report a child as homeless if they do not apply for and receive services under McKinney-Vento. The National Center for Homeless Education advises officials to count enrolled homeless children and youth even if they decline services available to them.

In Oklahoma, hundreds of districts report that no students experience homelessness. Tammy Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, hears a common refrain from school leaders when she asks why.

“They tell me, ‘We’re going to take care of all of our students, whether we identify them as homeless or not,’’’ Smith said. “I remind them it’s federal law, but it’s kind of [an] uphill battle.”

Leaving homeless children out of official records is a problem even if a district does manage to support them without properly counting them, said Amanda Peterson, the director of educational improvement and support at the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction.

“If we are not able to tell the story, we’re not able to show that there’s discrepancies in the graduation rate, then what ends up happening is that it’s easy for legislators, community members, others to just close their eyes to the issue and just say, ‘Well, if it’s not reported, it doesn’t exist, and therefore we don’t need to worry about it,’” she said. “There’s harm if we just sort of push it under the rug.”

Yuma Union High School District does not count students as homeless if their family doesn’t apply for services under McKinney-Vento.

‘Not enough money’ to support homeless students

Federal programs provide school districts little financial incentive to survey students’ housing situations more thoroughly. Money to serve these vulnerable children is limited and does not increase automatically as districts identify more of them, Public Integrity found.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Education awards funds to states using a formula that factors in poverty rates. States use their share to award competitive grants to districts.

Calling them paltry is an understatement.

The funding amounted to about $60 per identified homeless student nationwide before the pandemic. One state received less than $30 per student.

That’s a fraction of what school districts actually spend to support homeless students, according to a recent study by the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. The four districts profiled by LPI spent between $128 and $556 per homeless student identified. In two of those districts, McKinney-Vento subgrants accounted for less than 14 cents on every dollar the district spent on homeless education programs.

And that’s the districts awarded federal grants. Most get nothing.

Until a temporary funding influx during the pandemic, only one in four districts nationwide received dedicated funding. Washington state, which got the lowest amount in the 2018 fiscal year at $29 per identified student, passed a law in 2016 to provide additional support and resources.

“I would argue that a state like Washington has better identification, but it’s not reflected in how the feds dole out the money from McKinney-Vento,” said Duffield of SchoolHouse Connection.

Even in states that receive hundreds of dollars per student, the money does not stretch far, experts said. And it’s definitely not enough to provide long-term assistance for students without stable housing.

One sign of its inadequacy: Many districts don’t even bother applying for the federal money. In Oklahoma, just 25 of the state’s 509 districts requested funds.

Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, urges districts to apply. She said superintendents tell her, “There’s not a monetary benefit for us to identify them. So that’s not where we’re spending our time.”

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan made $800 million available to states and districts to identify and support homeless students, some of whom became disconnected from schools after the COVID-19 closures of 2020. The historic funding influx was seven times the annual budget awarded to schools to support their homeless students in 2022, making federal funds available to districts that had not previously received money.

In Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located, the additional funding was sorely needed, said Steven Ezikian, the deputy superintendent of the Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency, which helps train local districts to identify and support students experiencing homelessness.

“McKinney-Vento does not provide nearly enough funding,” he said. “Frankly, there’s just not enough money for them to do all the work for the amount of kids that we have.”

The traditional level of funding to support homelessness has left many districts struggling to fulfill the law’s requirements.

“There [are] more and more students in crisis and the districts are not really getting more and more resources to help,” said Scott, the senior youth attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center. “It comes down to resources rather than any kind of bad intent. The lack of investment in our schools over time is obviously hitting homeless students even harder.”

In April, 92 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a “Dear Colleague” letter, urging the chairwoman and ranking member of the House Education Committee to renew the $800 million in funding, which represents 1% of the federal education budget, for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. It would be money well spent, they argued.

“Investing in a young person’s life will enable them to avoid chronic homelessness, intergenerational cycles of poverty, and pervasive instances of trauma,” the letter read.

Budget bills from both chambers of Congress requested boosts in the program budget that are far short of what the House members requested. Federal budget negotiations will likely resume in December.

Temecula Valley Unified, the district Beth Petersen’s son attends, received $56,000 to serve homeless students through the American Rescue Plan — about $470 per homeless student identified. District staff did not respond to questions regarding funding for homeless education programs. State financial records for the several years before the American Rescue Plan show the district received nothing.

Petersen watches from her apartment steps as her son leaves for the school bus.

Early on a Monday morning in October, Petersen sat at the kitchen table in her shared apartment, applying makeup under the glare of a bowl-shaped ceiling light. Her son emerged from the bathroom, barefoot but otherwise dressed for school. Petersen peered around the corner. Did he want anything for breakfast? He shrugged. No, he was fine.

But then he remembered an assignment that was due: a photo with his mom clearing him to attend a sexual education course. He stooped beside her and angled his laptop for a selfie. Beth could hardly remember the last time she needed to review any of his assignments. He was always a diligent student, even these last few months.

“Do not miss the bus coming home or we will be up a creek,” she said as the pair walked outside, the air crisp as morning haze yielded to blue sky.

At 7:02 a.m., a yellow school bus turned the corner. It slowed to a stop before them, the fruits of Petersen’s long struggle to make the promise of the McKinney-Vento law a reality.

The doors opened, and her son was on his way.

Chalkbeat journalist Lori Higgins contributed to this article.

Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell are journalists with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates inequality.

About our analysis

Public Integrity used a statistical modeling technique called simple linear regression to measure the strength of the association between the percent of students identified as homeless and, separately, three measures used to approximate the incidence of economic disadvantage or poverty:

the percent of students eligible for free- or reduced-price meals
the percent of school-age children under the poverty line
the percent of school-age children in households that are under 50% of the poverty line.

We used federal data aggregated to the level of school districts and similar educational agencies, composing separate models by school year and state. We fit models for each state and the District of Columbia where there was sufficient data in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

We considered that a model showed a link between a variable we tested and homelessness if the model accounted for at least 20% of the variation in rates of homelessness and if the probability of coincidence driving results at least as extreme was relatively small. Twenty-four states failed this test on each of the three measures of economic disadvantage.

We assumed districts not included in federal data identified no homeless students. Districts may occasionally be left out in error. But we think our count is conservative in another way. That’s because there are additional districts that specifically told the Department of Education they have no homeless students, but the agency categorized them with districts reporting a low number of students and suppressed those figures.

For more details on our analysis, read our white paper.

Facing enrollment drop, one Bronx middle school tries its hand at marketing

2022-11-02T22:33:36+00:00

Will Frackelton held a microphone in front of dozens of his seventh and eighth graders, wriggling in their seats in the auditorium that they share with two other Bronx schools.

Students and staff from Soundview Academy for Culture and Scholarship, where Frackelton is the principal, had gathered for a town hall last month that covered school safety, high school applications, and other topics. Before dismissing them, Frackelton made an unusual request: Would they help market the school over the next two weeks?

“I know you know kids that are in middle schools that are not happy, that don’t treat them like kids,” the middle school’s leader told the students. “I got 25 spots in the sixth grade, 25 spots in the seventh grade, 25 spots in the eighth grade, and if I don’t fill them with kids in 18 days, they’re gonna ask me this summer to let a bunch of teachers go.”

Frackelton’s request reflects a precarious budget situation facing many schools in a system where school funding is largely tied to enrollment, and enrollment has been plunging.

At the end of September, higher-ups at the education department informed Frackelton that they overestimated their enrollment projections used to calculate his school’s budget this year. With 75 fewer students than projected, his school owed the department about $750,000. If his roster didn’t grow by Oct. 31, he would either have to let go of several new teachers, or put the debt off until next year.

But Frackelton saw a third choice: Enroll 75 children before the deadline.

By the middle of the month, Frackelton had created a flier and a video to share on social media to entice families to enroll their children at Soundview, with the help of a former colleague who specializes in video production. Now, he was asking parents, staff and students, if they liked the school, to share the material everywhere.

Frackelton made this plea: “Find a kid, save a teacher.”

Enrollment declines put schools in tight spot

Many schools across New York City are facing enrollment declines. With 9.5% fewer students since the pandemic, most schools have seen budget cuts. As a result, many have larger class sizes and cuts to enrichment activities or extra programs for students.

During the pandemic, schools were held harmless for losing more students than projected. Now, schools are once again facing what is known as the “mid-year adjustment” — owing money if your roster is less than projected, or getting more if your numbers are higher. Department officials did not answer questions about how many schools fell below projections and owed money.

At the start of this school year, Soundview Academy enrolled just under 300 students, hitting a decade low. Though enrollment has dropped across the city since 2015, Soundview’s student body had been growing — until the pandemic.

Education department enrollment projections are rarely an exact science. Over the past decade, Soundview typically enrolled more students than projected. This year, they signed up 350 students by summertime. By September, staff were surprised that 75 of those children failed to show up. Frackelton assumed most had fled to charters, but found out only 11% of them did so. Nearly 60% left New York City. About 20% enrolled in other schools within Soundview’s district. The rest went to other district schools.

“In a post-pandemic New York public school reality, there’s just less kids, right, and there was no strategic plan,” for how schools like his should respond, Frackelton said. “So I decided, I’m just going to go for broke and see if we can come up with our own marketing strategy.”

Soundview Academy gets creative

By the day of the student town hall on Oct. 14, Frackelton’s school had enrolled roughly 10 more kids since he got the warning letter from the education department. That left 65 to go.

Kevin Lopez, a former staffer under Frackelton who is now an assistant principal at Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, filmed footage for a 15-second promotional video at no cost to the school. It features Frackelton’s voice and clips of a couple of students talking about the school, as well as clips of students in classrooms.

It ends with an overhead shot of the school building and the school’s official seal, with the words, “WE CHOOSE YOU, ENROLL NOW!”

All fifth graders must apply to get into middle school in New York City. Like most city middle schools now, Soundview doesn’t screen elementary school students who want to enroll. It is also a community school this year, meaning that, because they serve a large share of high-needs students, the school partners with a nonprofit organization to provide wraparound support for children.

On the day before the student town hall, Frackelton’s team shared the promotional video on Instagram. During a parent association meeting that same evening, he pleaded with parents to spread the word on social media.

“I need you to come in tomorrow and grab some fliers, go to the buses, go to the trains, go down to that school, Bronx Charter [School] For The Arts, and get our kids back,” Frackelton told the group. (Bronx Charter School For the Arts did not immediately respond for comment.)

One of those new teachers is ErrDaisha Floyd, who teaches seventh grade social studies and is in her first year of teaching. Students are struggling more than she anticipated with reading difficult texts and staying focused. It’s been easier to help children one-on-one during periods when she has a special education teacher assist her class.

If there are big cuts to staff next year, it’s going to make school even harder, she believes.

“It’s just not fair for the students or the teachers because there will be a lot of students whose needs are not being met,” Floyd said.

Choosing to let go of teachers now would destroy the school’s programming, Frackelton said, right as staff is trying to help get students on grade level in reading and math, including through special periods dedicated to improving phonics and reading skills. Just under 6% of Soundview students passed state math tests last school year, compared with about 27% before the pandemic, but reading proficiency levels stayed about the same, with about 30% of students passing, according to data from the city and state. However, far fewer children took the tests last school year compared with 2019, making it difficult to make comparisons.

While Frackelton doesn’t believe the cuts would directly affect core instruction in reading and math, it’s likely that class sizes would grow. And funding cuts would mean paring back their dual language program — the only such middle school program in their district — far less arts and dance programming and courses in the school’s new technology lab that has 3D printers. Those are activities that the school pushes children to get involved in so that they can “find motivation” beyond academics, he said.

Cuts could also hamper the school’s efforts to pair students with teacher mentors. Those mentors currently have 10-15 students each and check in with them three times a day, but cuts to funding would mean cuts to staff, making it harder for teachers to build those connections. Many of the school’s children, 83% of whom are living in poverty and several of whom are transferring in from another school for safety reasons, benefit from having someone to talk to, Frackelton said.

Soundview’s focus on things beyond academics is what first attracted Farah Despeignes, the president of the parent association, to the school a few years ago. Her son didn’t want to attend their zoned school, so he applied to Soundview. He began pursuing dance, gymnastics, and cooking— activities he used to think of as reserved for girls — and began questioning traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

“It actually helped him to grow quite a bit,” Despeignes said of her son, now in high school.

He started at Townsend Harris High School in Queens this year, and her younger son is now an eighth grader at Soundview after they were both home-schooled last year.

Despeignes worried her children would get sick and that there were not enough social-emotional resources for students and staff — not just at Soundview, but citywide.

She sensed many families felt the same last school year and wondered if that’s why people left.

“We didn’t see that support network and those wraparound services,” Despeignes said. “For those reasons, I think that’s what created the situation we are seeing now.”

She also spread the word about the school, but she knew it would be hard to attract families who had already settled into their choices for the year. She’s hoping to share her view that things have been going well for her eighth grader.

“So far, so good,” she said.

Efforts fall short

By Oct. 25 — six days until the deadline — the school had enrolled about 15 new students.

But five had left.

Still the debt to the education department dropped significantly. The school now owes $490,000, Frackelton said.

His new goal is to get more students enrolled by next fall.

One day past the deadline, on Nov. 1, the school held its middle school fair. Frackelton said many people attended, and they handed out fliers left and right.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois school districts received billions in COVID relief funds but some are slow to spend

2022-10-31T11:00:00+00:00

Illinois school districts have received more than $7 billion in federal relief money to help reopen schools and ease the academic and mental health fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But a Chalkbeat/Better Government Association analysis found that a slew of high-poverty districts across the state have spent small fractions of their relief funds, despite serving students who were especially hard hit by the pandemic. Many are in Chicago’s south suburbs, where almost a dozen districts have reported spending 15% or less of their federal dollars. Bloom Township, where 72% of almost 3,000 students are low-income, has spent only 6% of its $20 million allocation, according to state data.

Statewide, districts have spent about $2.8 billion of the total they received, as a federal fall 2024 deadline is looming.

High-poverty Illinois districts have spent a smaller portion – about 42% – of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER, allocations than wealthier districts, which have spent roughly 60%, according to the Chalkbeat/BGA analysis of state records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. These high-poverty districts received much more recovery money and have overall spent more per pupil than wealthier ones.

State officials have taken notice of the slow spending in some districts, but are not concerned.

Krish Mohip, the deputy operational education officer for the Illinois State Board of Education, said the state has reached out to some districts that have reported spending little of their allocations or haven’t yet submitted plans for the latest two of three COVID relief packages. But he said his agency is confident that — if districts aren’t spending the money briskly yet — they have solid plans to do so in the next couple of years. Spending is picking up this fall, he noted.

“With ESSER III, we still have a way to go, but we have a lot of time,” Mohip said. “We really don’t have concerns about the rate of spending right now.”

Leaders in some high-poverty districts in Illinois, mostly in southern suburbs, say they have confronted issues with hiring and supply chains that have caused slower spending of their ESSER funds.

School leaders in the south suburban districts where the funds have been spent more slowly say they have confronted supply chain issues, hiring challenges, and other hurdles. Some said they have spent more briskly than state data suggests, but need to get caught up on reporting expenses.

Yet some education experts are questioning why some districts have been slower to spend their funds — emergency aid intended to help address the heightened academic and social-emotional needs of students. About 30% of Illinois students met reading state standards and about a quarter did in math this year, about 20% fewer students than in 2019, according to state data.

“If there are good ways to spend the money well right now, what are districts waiting for?” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. “Kids have been hurt both academically and emotionally. We want to know what they are doing now to make kids whole.”

In Chicago’s south suburbs, spending is slow

Among the districts slowest to spend COVID money are a cluster of about 15 south suburban districts, which serve overwhelmingly low-income Black and Latino student populations. Those districts have spent 14% of their federal dollars on average. That’s about $1,200 per pupil – less than half the average amount for high-poverty districts statewide.

Almost 80% of students in these south suburban districts live in poverty. About 12% of their students met state standards in reading on the 2022 state report card and roughly 7% did in math, showing marked decreases in proficiency compared with pre-pandemic.

Brookwood School District 167, a district that serves 57% low-income students, has reported spending only 7% of its $6 million — or $449,228 — as of mid-September.

Brookwood Superintendent Bethany Lindsay said delays in the supply chain have been a factor, pointing to the delay in getting four vans the district purchased to transport students to field trips and community events.

“It took a year to receive them,” she said. “So we couldn’t claim that until we received them.”

Lindsay said the district has focused on removing obstacles that impact academic, social, and emotional learning for its more than 1,000 pre-K to eighth grade students. For example, the recently purchased vans help remove transportation barriers and expose students to new experiences, she said. In Brookwood, almost 17% of students met state standards in reading, and 6% did in math on the 2022 tests.

“The pandemic really showed that vulnerable populations were going to be most impaired because they have limited access to things already,” said Lindsay.

In addition to the vans, Brookwood has spent its money to adopt a two-to-one technology initiative that guarantees students have devices both at home and at school. The district also added another social worker to each of its four schools and has built two new playgrounds.

Lindsay said the district will share updated spending figures with the state in a quarterly expenditure report due at the end of October – a report required of all districts.

In the coming years, Lindsay said, the district will build a STEM and performing arts center to increase representation in those fields and to give students a place of creative expression.

“People can experience that for 100 years,” she said. “So it really stands for something in the community.”

Other south suburban district officials had varying reasons for the slow pace of spending. Some noted that school building repair projects took awhile to get off the ground; others said they are still figuring out what learning software to buy. One district, Dolton West, is holding on to the bulk of its ESSER money to undertake an uncommon plan to embrace hybrid learning next fall.

National experts say districts across the country have sometimes been slow to spend the federal money because they have grappled with how to make the best use of such a large windfall.

Many districts worry about having to lay off new hires and cut new programs when the one-time money runs out. Hiring shortages and supply chain issues have crimped some plans to spend the money, and these issues can be tougher for high-poverty districts, said Marguerite Roza of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

West Harvey-Dixmoor, where almost every student is low-income, has reported spending 13% of its federal COVID recovery money as of mid-September, according to state data. The district, where 7% of students met state standards in reading on the 2022 test and 3.5% did in math, earmarked a portion of the latest COVID package to address learning loss as required by the feds.

But the two interim superintendents, who stepped in at the end of 2021, made a plan to spend most of the district’s almost $17 million allocation on building projects.

“Our facilities haven’t actually been updated in close to 20 years,” said interim superintendent Creg Williams.

Williams said it took a while for the district to line up contractors and bring in materials and equipment to ramp up these projects, which include removing asbestos, upgrading ventilation systems and a school cafeteria, and refreshing flooring, doors, and student lockers. He said the district also launched an extended day learning program this school year and hired a dean of students and an instructional coach, and fall reporting to the state will reflect much additional spending.

In Hazel Crest, superintendent Kenneth Spells also said the district has spent more briskly than the 9% of the district’s $8.3 million allocation that state data shows, though he could not provide up-to-date amounts for how much his district has actually spent. In addition to spending on COVID mitigation measures, Spells said, the district has hired additional teachers so it could staff co-educators in some larger classrooms. It also paid existing staff to offer Saturday school for students needing additional academic help.

The district, where 99% of students are low-income, saw reading proficiency dip to about 9% in reading and 3.5% in math during the pandemic.

“We’re seeing some progress,” he said, “but it’s still early in the game.”

“Story is still being written”

The data obtained by Chalkbeat and the BGA shows all federal COVID relief expenditures reported by Illinois’ roughly 850 districts by mid-September, and is broken into five broad categories: capital projects, supplies and materials, employee salaries, benefits, and outside vendor contracts.

High-poverty districts have been more likely to put these federal funds into school facilities while wealthier ones have steered more dollars toward supplies and salaries.

Chicago has been an outlier among high-poverty districts in spending a large portion of its federal COVID relief dollars on salaries and benefits, largely for positions that already existed when the pandemic hit.

But beyond the broad categories, the state data offers little detail on what exactly districts bought with the money. And it doesn’t answer key questions, such as whether salary and benefit spending is for new or existing employees.

Jianan Shi, executive director of the parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand, says parents have generally wanted to see more urgency – and transparency – from districts in spending the federal money.

“We have seen districts small and large fail to be transparent and to include parents in decision-making,” he said.

What Shi consistently hears parents say they want to see: more outreach to reconnect with students and families who disengaged from learning during the pandemic; more staff in schools to support students; after-school programs; mental health support and tutoring.

Spending on facilities allows districts to use the one-time money without setting themselves up for layoffs or program cuts down the road, and some research has suggested a link between better school buildings and student learning.

Still, Shi said, “I don’t remember many parents saying, ‘Let’s just fix this issue in my facility with this money.’ We forget we are talking about students here.”

Mohip, of the state board of education, said his agency monitors the expenditure data districts submit closely, and staff has reached out to some districts to see if they need any help or guidance. He notes districts overwhelmingly met a recent federal deadline to spend the first wave of pandemic recovery money aimed at schools.

Some districts are holding on to the money for good reasons, he said. For instance, a district might have bought computers and other technology early in the pandemic, and might be waiting until closer to the end of the equipment’s life cycle to replace it. Others might still be working to fill new positions.

Ultimately, the money will make a difference, he said. “As of right now, that story is still being written. What we do know is that the money was needed and helpful at a time of distress.”

Some of these districts may be waiting to spend their remaining funds on replacing technology, or to fill new positions at their schools.

Other districts have spent COVID money briskly

Generally, the Chalkbeat/BGA analysis found, wealthier districts have spent their smaller funds briskly.

New Trier Township, for instance, has already burned through its $1.2 million allocation. The affluent school district in Chicago’s north suburbs serving nearly 3,850 students used the money for protective equipment, COVID testing, and other reopening expenditures. It also added two instructional assistants focused on math instruction and an academic interventionist.

But some high-poverty districts have also already spent most of the federal dollars.

Laraway, a small district about an hour southwest of downtown Chicago, has spent almost 80% of its $1.8 million allocation.

Superintendent Joe Salmieri said the district put some of the money toward hiring a teaching assistant for each elementary classroom to better target students who need more help.

“It was full-court press — all hands on deck,” said Salmieri. “Time is of the essence to address the negative effects of the pandemic.”

Initially, Salmieri said, the district struggled to recruit candidates, so it increased the pay and was able to fill most of the jobs this past summer.

The district, where almost all 450 students qualify for subsidized lunch, has also updated its math curriculum and ramped up after-school and summer programming. Salmieri said academic recovery is likely a “three-year journey.”

In Pembroke, an elementary district that serves 173 students, including 91% living in poverty, has spent 90% of the $3.4 million it received. Most of the money has been used on upgrading the single school building and tackling the pandemic’s academic damage, said Superintendent Nicole Terrell-Smith.

On the 2022 state tests, about 10% of students scored proficient in reading, and almost 11% did in math. To address this, Terrell-Smith has proposed that all students receive a personalized learning plan to help teachers tailor instruction to their academic needs. Currently, staff are getting professional development to help them to create these plans for the 2023-24 school year.

“I don’t want to have a beautiful facility but students who can’t read,” said Terrell-Smith.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Jewél Jackson covers K-12 and higher education for the Better Government Association. Contact her at jjackson@bettergov.org

In one high-poverty Chicago suburb, a plan to use COVID relief funds to embrace hybrid learning

2022-10-31T11:00:00+00:00

Back in May, the superintendent of Dolton West, a high-poverty elementary district in Chicago’s south suburbs, invited a group of educators to learn about “the next generation classroom.”

“I think it’s pretty cool,” superintendent Kevin Nohelty told them. “Way out there.”

In the vision laid out that day by a tech consultant and a sales rep from an interactive board manufacturer, the entire 1,890-student district would embrace hybrid learning. In each classroom, two or more large touch screens would allow the teacher to interact with students tuning in from home or from other classrooms. A camera mounted on the ceiling would track the teacher for those remote students.

Dolton West plans to spend the bulk of its $21 million in federal pandemic recovery money to bring a similar vision — one that melds in-person and remote learning — to the district, Nohelty told Chalkbeat. It’s a highly uncommon step for a district serving elementary students, most of whom are Black and living in poverty.

Superintendent Kevin Nohelty plans on rolling out Dolton West’s hybrid learning plan next fall.

Nohelty says the hybrid learning plan will roll out next fall and make the district a national trailblazer, “unstoppable” if another pandemic or other major disruption hits.

Officials say the revamp would allow the district to proactively address teacher shortages and to rethink the school day and week, with students attending, say, three days in person and two virtually.

“The classroom would no longer be just the four walls,” Nohelty said. “You can be anywhere in the world and be able to engage with your teachers.”

Over the past year, some experts and student advocates have voiced frustration that few school districts are using pandemic relief dollars as federal education leaders urged: to boldly reimagine learning post-pandemic. Meanwhile, education tech companies are angling to capitalize on the influx of federal money by convincing school districts to double down on the technology that kept them going during COVID school shutdowns.

But for many educators, simultaneously teaching in-person and remote students was among the most challenging aspects of pandemic schooling. And online learning did not work well for many students — especially younger learners and those living in poverty.

Has Dolton hit on a solution to a slew of post-pandemic challenges — or is it setting out to address the academic fallout from the pandemic by giving students more of what contributed to that fallout in the first place?

Some experts question whether the district is giving itself enough time to pilot its plan, secure permission from the state to roll it out, and get input from families and educators.

The district, which serves the neighboring communities of Dolton and Riverdale, has not yet broadly shared its hybrid learning vision with parents and teachers beyond last spring’s focus group. The teachers union president, for one, says she only heard about the plan from a Chalkbeat reporter.

Loree Washington, a Dolton community leader and parent mentor whose son graduated from junior high in the district, said she would be skeptical about shifting any portion of the school day and school week back online without a pressing reason.

“The virtual learning environment was not successful for us — it just didn’t work,” she said. “So if you are offering more of that, what is your plan to ensure success? We know we can’t do the same thing and expect a different result because that would be insanity.”

Dolton looks to create hybrid learning plan

At Washington Elementary in Riverdale, principal Josh Markward says the pandemic pushed the district to become more tech-savvy.

Dolton spent much of the first of three federal COVID relief packages to close the digital gap, getting students computers and hotspots to connect to the internet at home. This school year, across Washington’s classrooms, tablets and headphones share desk space with textbooks.

Veteran educators such as Anita Pennington can be found at an interactive whiteboard, working on rhyming words with a pair of struggling second grade readers while their classmates do a reading comprehension exercise on their Chromebooks.

But the pandemic and the shift to remote learning also tested students in the economically distressed Chicago Southland district, where officials take pride in providing free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to every student, and in focusing on social-emotional learning and restorative justice since long before the pandemic.

Dolton, with a shrinking tax base, only receives about 70% of adequate state funding, by the state education agency’s own math. Washington and other community leaders recently joined a new statewide campaign to advocate for fully funding schools.

Students in Anita Pennington’s reading class receive small group instruction while others use Boom Cards on their laptops at Washington Elementary.

Citing COVID fears among families and teachers, the district remained virtual for the entire 2020-21 school year, making it a national outlier.

“Academically, (the pandemic) was tough,” Markward said. “Everyone took a big hit. Everyone was trying to figure it out, teaching on a computer screen.”

On the state’s 2022 standardized tests, 4% of Dolton students met Illinois standards in math, and 9% did in reading, both down slightly compared with before COVID. Chronic absenteeism jumped by more than 20 percentage points, to 53% of students.

After returning to full-time in-person instruction last fall, the district set out to address the damage. In a federal COVID relief spending plan submitted to the state, it said it would beef up its after-school programs and hire additional staff to help with students’ recovery, among other measures.

Then, officials shifted gears. Nohelty said he wanted to save the remaining roughly $20 million for a bolder, more comprehensive plan to rethink learning.

Nohelty says he was deeply shaken after watching the pandemic upend learning in his district — and feels it’s crucial that districts prepare for the next disruption now.

“I don’t want to go through that again and put learning on the backburner,” he said. Thanks to his hybrid plan, “We would be unstoppable — and I say that with passion.”

The hybrid model would give students who are sick, traveling, or missing a ride to school a chance to remain connected to the classroom, he said. That could be a game-changer for students with disabilities that make regular attendance challenging.

And, Nohelty says, the district would be prepared for staffing shortages, allowing educators to teach students in more than one classroom — perhaps with an aide or substitute supervising the students logging on from other classrooms.

“It’s what I would consider very cutting-edge,” Nohelty said of the district’s hybrid plan. “I do believe we are going to change the way we do learning in Southland.”

When Frank Brandolino of Joliet-based Velocita Technology came to meet with the educator focus group last May, he explained that his company has been developing a hybrid “solution” along with Nohelty and Dolton’s deputy superintendent, Sonya Whitaker. Besides the technology, the plan would also include extensive professional development, he said.

The interactive board rep demonstrated software that teachers can use on their boards that allows students to take quizzes, share photos, and “huddle” to collaborate virtually with each other. As many as 60 students can log on at one time, the sales rep noted. Teachers, meanwhile, can track whether students are actively engaging with the platform.

The portal, accessible from anywhere in the world, is the company’s “COVID child,” the rep said. Brandolino then showed a short video featuring a college History 101 class, in which four in-person and 16 virtual students collaborate on an assignment about ancient civilizations and then share their work with the class.

Teachers peppered the group with questions, some voicing enthusiasm for the portal’s features.

Dolton West’s hybrid model would allow students who are sick or absent from school to stay connected to their classrooms.

Experts raise questions about Dolton’s plan

Bree Dusseault, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, says that it’s refreshing to see a district thinking about how the federal relief dollars can help reimagine learning. Overwhelmingly, districts have used the money to buttress a status quo whose inequities and limitations the pandemic underscored.

In surveys, high school students have said they want schools to look different after the pandemic, and some have voiced interest in the flexibility hybrid learning can offer, including for students juggling school with work, internships, or college-credit classes.

But, says Dusseault, remote learning was hard for younger learners. Given the planned fall of 2023 districtwide launch, a number of questions remain, Dusseault says:

Does Dolton have time to pilot this model on a small scale, then gradually roll it out based on data on student outcomes it collects along the way? How will officials reconcile the plan with state instructional time requirements and employee contract obligations? How will the district sustain the ongoing costs of the plan, including refreshing technology, once the federal money runs out?

Most importantly, how will the district ensure that students learning remotely part-time remain engaged in learning? Do all students even have a quiet, safe place to learn virtually?

Those were issues in Dolton during remote learning, when several teachers told Chalkbeat that some students joined in from noisy settings while others eventually stopped logging on.

“This district might be looking to implement a plan that’s not fully baked,” Dusseault said. “Innovation for innovation’s sake is not what we’re looking for.”

Both Dusseault and Bart Epstein, an expert at the University of Virginia and head of the nonprofit EdTech Evidence Exchange, are not aware of other districts adopting indefinite hybrid learning. There are good reasons for that, says Epstein: Expecting young students to stay home two days a week would be a hardship for parents and a challenge for teachers having to juggle both in-person and virtual learners.

“Having hybrid learning as an option for some students to use occasionally is a great idea,” he said. “I am not aware of anybody making the argument that permanent, forced hybrid learning is a net win for students.”

Dusseault stresses district officials need to be communicating about their plan with teachers and families and gathering feedback. Now.

Darlene McMillan, the head of the district’s teachers union, said she was reluctant to comment on the plan until the district spells it out publicly. She said staff vacancies are indeed an issue in Dolton. But the idea of teaching multiple classrooms using hybrid technology concerns her, and might be at odds with the district’s educator contract, she said.

Technology has powered learning in Dolton

On a recent Thursday afternoon, second grade teacher Richard Kealey stood in front of an interactive board in his classroom in Dolton’s Lincoln Elementary. He was teaching addition to the nine students in attendance that day.

A boy — dressed in the district’s uniform of white polo shirts and navy pants — had answered that 5 plus 4 equals 9. Kealey scribbled that answer onto the board with his finger and asked his students if it was correct.

“Don’t be shy, class,” he said. “Speak up!”

Teacher Richard Kealey assists his students as they use i-Ready to learn math at Lincoln Elementary in Dolton.

The students responded with a chorus of yeses. Then they put away their workbooks under their desks, donned headphones, and fired up their tablets. Kealey walked the room checking on students as they logged on to a math program called i-Ready, which offers a series of math games that grow easier or harder depending on how well users do — a program Kealey and Lincoln principal Byron Stingily credit with faster-than-projected growth in math.

Kealey estimates his students missed out on half a year of learning during the virtual stretch. A year after they returned to campus, there is still academic and social-emotional catching-up to do.

“It has been great to have students back in person,” he said. “Remote is really challenging on kids.”

During student pickup at Lincoln later that afternoon, some parents and students echoed that refrain: Technology: good. Virtual learning: hard.

Seventh grader Ja’Shawn McGee said bouncing back from remote learning has been tough. He is still trying to get back on track, especially in math and science.

“It was hard, trying to learn on a laptop,” he said. “I like being in front of a teacher.”

Eternity Lee said her son, Elijah, is also playing catch-up.

“He hated e-learning,” she said. “He missed his friends. He fell behind academically.”

In Dolton, students are still catching up academically after the pandemic’s disruptions; some parents say virtual learning tested families.

She said she wants to see the district spend its federal COVID relief dollars on after-school programs and more one-on-one help with reading for her son, echoing the original spending plan the district had submitted to the state.

Nohelty says the model he envisions won’t simply reprise the virtual learning seen during the early days of the pandemic, but rather draw on its lessons to make technology work better for students going forward.

He acknowledged the district is going into uncharted territory. He is considering a site visit to high schools in California that have adopted hybrid learning. The district still must ask the state to waive some seat time requirements, step up public engagement about the plan, and work out the details of a pilot later this school year. He hopes to bring the plan to his school board in December and seek proposals from vendors next year.

Washington, the Dolton community leader who has served as a parent mentor in elementary classrooms for years, says educators need more help to catch students up academically, from tutoring to more after-school programs.

“If we’re talking about emergency funding, tell me what you’ll do to address the damage now,” she said. “What are we doing about student achievement?”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Remote learning not ‘primary’ driver of academic losses, new analysis suggests

2022-10-28T23:15:06+00:00

Exactly how much did remote learning contribute to students’ academic losses during the pandemic?

A new analysis released Friday inches us closer to a complicated answer.

Using the latest national and state test score data, a team of researchers found that districts that stayed remote during the 2020-21 school year did see bigger declines in elementary and middle school math, and to some degree in reading, than other districts in their state.

But the losses varied widely — and many districts that went back in person had bigger losses than districts that stayed remote. The pattern is inconsistent enough that school closures, it seems, were not the primary driver of those drops in achievement.

“Based on the discussion before these results came out, you’d think that the only thing driving achievement losses would be remote learning, but actually that does not seem to be the case,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor of education and economics who co-led the research. “I was really surprised by these results.”

Earlier research by Kane and others found a strong tie between declines in academic performance and remote learning, which posed huge challenges for students and families nationwide.

The new analysis is the first to look at how the pandemic affected math and reading achievement in many individual school districts. The team relied on testing data for 29 states, spanning around 4,000 school districts that serve some 12 million students in third to eighth grades — or around half of the U.S. student population for those age groups.

Researchers then combined that information with scores released this week from a key national test known as NAEP, which allowed them to compare student performance in spring 2019 and spring 2022. They found that, this year, the students in the median school district had learned about half a grade level less in math and about a quarter of a grade level less in reading, compared with their pre-pandemic peers. (Those conversions of scores to time are inexact, but the researchers say they offer the clearest picture for parents.)

There were drastic differences in performance among districts in each state, they found, with a number of districts actually doing better since the pandemic, a small number doing much worse, and most seeing some declines.

“The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes, leaving devastating learning losses in some districts, while leaving many other districts untouched,” Kane said. “But until now, that damage has been hard to see.”

The research team also found that high-poverty districts suffered greater academic losses, offering a more sobering picture than the national NAEP results did and echoing some earlier pandemic research.

The differences in lost learning between low- and high-poverty districts weren’t large, but were noteworthy, particularly in math. The trend held for reading, though the differences were smaller.

Researchers said math was likely more affected than reading in high-poverty districts — a trend in that subject that’s been widely observed — because school plays a bigger role in how students learn to do math.

These findings, Reardon said, should prompt federal and state leaders to make sure high-poverty schools have the funding and mental health support they need long-term, “so that we don’t end up with a permanently larger amount of inequality than we had before the pandemic.”

How remote learning affected academics

The researchers cautioned that their analysis can’t disentangle the effects of remote learning from other factors. It’s possible the districts that stayed remote longer differed in other meaningful ways from districts that reopened quickly, Reardon said, so researchers will have to do more digging “to really tease out” what happened.

The team will be adding data from more states as it becomes available. Some states that haven’t yet been analyzed, such as Maryland and New Jersey, saw high rates of school closures and big drops in student achievement.

In the coming weeks, the team plans to look at how COVID death rates, internet access, and parent job losses may have contributed to score declines.

“All of those things affected children’s ability to be able to learn,” Reardon said. “So while the remote learning is probably a piece of the story, it’s probably a small piece of all the ways the pandemic affected children’s outcomes.”

The uneven quality of remote instruction likely contributed to the variation in student performance, too.

Some students had access to daily live instruction with their teachers, while others spent large chunks of time working on their own, or doing work in paper packets. Students with spotty internet access often weren’t able to watch live lessons and teachers reported that some students logged on while they were working or caring for siblings. Others stopped attending virtual class altogether.

Kane said he hoped their data would urge school districts to beef up their academic recovery plans this spring and summer with strategies like tutoring and extra instruction during vacations — while schools still have time to spend their COVID relief dollars. Too many districts have put smaller efforts in place, he said, that won’t be sufficient to tackle the losses his team found.

“The average kid missed half a year of learning in math, and we’re not going to make up for half a year of learning with a few extra days of instruction or by providing tutors to 5% to 10% of kids,” Kane said.

What he doesn’t want to see is schools waiting to make changes until spring 2023 test results come in sometime next year when they may find: “Wow, kids are still way far behind.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Sweeping research effort tackles big question: How to get tutoring that works to more kids

2022-10-27T18:05:14+00:00

Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.

A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.

“It feels like out in the education ecosphere people are sort of yelling at districts and saying: ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” said Kevin Huffman, the head of Accelerate, a nonprofit that awarded the grants. Districts are trying, he said, but it’s been complicated to staff in-person programs and difficult to vet tutoring services run by outside companies.

The research has the potential to help schools know which tutoring efforts are worth their time and money — before their COVID relief funding runs out.

“I think we’ve delivered the message collectively to the field that tutoring benefits all students, which is true based on the research, but it’s not a useful message when it comes to implementation,” Huffman added. “It’s just too broad and overwhelming, and I think the more we can help people narrow the scope on how to get started, the more likely we are to get traction.”

The research will look at tutoring efforts that are in-person, virtual, and a combination of the two. Accelerate expects some of the research will be available as early as next summer, while other studies will take more time.

Some of the research efforts are large, high-profile initiatives, such as the partnership between Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, which is studying the effects of tutoring and other academic recovery strategies on some 700,000 students across six states. Other studies will look at smaller efforts, like a student-launched virtual tutoring program called Tutor Teens that will partner with four high schools in the Cincinnati area.

Accelerate was launched earlier this year by the nonprofit America Achieves, which initially raised $65 million for the effort from private philanthropy — Arnold Ventures; the head of Citadel, Kenneth C. Griffin; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the Overdeck Family Foundation. (Chalkbeat also receives funding from the Gates Foundation.)

The nonprofit received more than 200 interested applicants, and tried to choose initiatives that were different from each other so the research would cover lots of ground. Accelerate also looked for efforts that zeroed in on specific student groups, such as English learners and struggling readers.

Some winners already have a proven track record, while others are start-ups that showed promise, Huffman said. The grants range in size from $100,000 to $800,000.

“A lot of these groups and organizations are taking first stabs at things that will need to be studied more,” Huffman said. “But our hope is that we’re starting down this path where instead of simply asking the question of whether tutoring works, we’re getting at the question of what are practical solutions” for getting that help to many more students.

The programs being studied include:

Amira Learning, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help students with literacy. The research will look at the effectiveness of pairing Amira’s virtual platform with in-person reading tutoring provided by young adults in California’s Central Valley to struggling elementary schoolers.
Amplify, a literacy tutoring company. The research will look at how a student’s race, gender, and language can affect the quality of a student-tutor match.
Deans for Impact, a nonprofit focused on teacher training, which will work with teacher prep programs to train and pair aspiring teachers with students who need tutoring, with a focus on math.
Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, which has an in-person tutoring program that targets high-need students in math, reading, and science. The research will look at how providing extra support to tutors can affect their relationships with students and student performance.
Great Oaks Foundation, which will recruit and train young people to be placed in schools for a year to tutor students in math and reading through AmeriCorps.
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network in California, which will expand its math tutoring program for middle and early high schoolers and work with the company Saga Education to provide tutors with more feedback on their work.
Matheka, a math tutoring company, which will recruit and train bilingual tutors from Latin America to provide English learners who speak Spanish with virtual tutoring in elementary school. The research will look at the effects on their math scores.
OnYourMarkEducation, a virtual literacy tutoring program, will work with the National Student Support Accelerator to conduct randomized control trial studies looking at whether different tutor-to-student ratios affect student performance.
Reading Partners, a nonprofit that’s been shown to provide effective literacy tutoring, will conduct a randomized control trial of the virtual version of its in-person program.
Teach for America will look at the effects of its program that uses college students to provide virtual tutoring to elementary schoolers in reading and middle schoolers in math.
Zearn, a virtual math tutoring company being used by the Tennessee education department to offer tutoring to half the state’s elementary and middle school students, will use preliminary data to look at student outcomes.

Huffman hopes the research will help show whether it’s possible to train high schoolers, parents, college students, and pre-service teachers to effectively tutor students in large numbers. Many schools would prefer to offer tutoring in person, but have faced major challenges finding enough staff locally.

There are a few other trends, too. As more schools look to put programs in place that follow the science of reading, several grantees are looking at the effectiveness of virtual early literacy tutoring.

Other research efforts aim to determine the right balance between in-person and virtual support.

“Broadly, we don’t have a great handle across the country yet on: What happens if you go from in person to Zoom?” Huffman said. “What are the ways that reduce the lift on in-person? Can you find those things without reducing the statistically significant impacts that tutoring in-person shows?”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Why are students missing so much school? The answer may lie in the chronic absenteeism ‘black box’

2022-10-13T20:45:00+00:00

Alarms are going off nationwide about absenteeism.

Many more students than usual missed big chunks of school during the pandemic, with some school districts seeing their chronic absenteeism rates double.

That metric, which looks at the share of students who missed 10% or more of the school year, is an important one. But it doesn’t offer any insight into why a student missed so much class — especially important in a period when students were often told to quarantine — or how best to help them.

Research released this month suggests that if schools want to answer those questions, they’ll have to open the “black box” of that chronically absent label.

“Because it’s super simplified, it’s hiding a lot of nuances,” said Jing Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Education. “We need to differentiate the reason behind absences to know how to help an individual kid.”

That’s what Liu and a colleague set out to do when they examined daily, class-level attendance data for nearly 40,000 middle and high school students in a big-city California district from the 2015-16 to 2017-18 school years.

A few patterns jumped out: Unexcused absences spiked as the year progressed, while excused absences held steady. Black and Hispanic students and students from low-income neighborhoods racked up unexcused absences faster than their white and more affluent peers. And when students missed a lot of class at the start of the year, their absences stacked up at a faster rate, too.

With that level of detail, Liu said, “you can intervene in a much more timely manner.”

Together, the findings underscore the power of detailed attendance data as schools try to re-engage students and curtail absenteeism. And though more districts are beefing up their tracking efforts with the help of COVID relief funds, many lack the details that would tell them what last year’s absences truly mean or offer clues about how to prevent students from missing class in the future.

“In most cases,” Liu said, “a sufficient system is not in place.”

How the pandemic complicated attendance tracking

Over the last decade, schools have begun paying closer attention to absenteeism, as the federal education department required schools to report this data and several states tied the metric to school ratings. The stakes are high: chronic absenteeism has been linked to higher dropout rates, lower academic achievement in reading and math, and school disengagement.

Nationally, about one in five students was chronically absent during the first full pandemic school year — an increase of 2 million students, according to newly released federal data analyzed by researchers at the nonprofit Attendance Works and Johns Hopkins University.

National data isn’t yet available for last school year, but several places have reported eye-popping increases. In New York City, 41% of students were chronically absent last year, up from around 27% the year before the pandemic began. In the Las Vegas area, the rate skyrocketed to 40% from 22% over that time. In Connecticut, 24% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 10% before COVID hit. And in Ohio, the rate soared to 30% from 17%.

As a result, districts are hiring more attendance staff, visiting students at home, or offering students gift cards for improved attendance. San Antonio’s district foundation is even hosting a car giveaway.

But figuring out exactly why chronic absenteeism is up can be tricky, especially since required quarantines, and COVID itself, kept lots of students out of school for stretches of time. Some districts tried to gather more details about these types of absences, but there wasn’t much consistency.

“There just got to be a lot of confusion,” said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works.

A few districts, like Los Angeles Unified, gathered enough details to pinpoint COVID’s effect. There, about half of all students were chronically absent last year, up from 19% before the pandemic. Quarantines accounted for 20 percentage points of that increase, district officials said, but another 11 points were due to other factors.

Others tried to untangle the various causes, but data issues ultimately left them in the dark.

In Fargo, North Dakota, for example, when attendance specialists followed up with parents who frequently reported their child was home with COVID or in quarantine, they sometimes found out the real reason was that the child had anxiety about coming to school, was being bullied, or felt they had fallen behind in a certain class.

“A lot of times though, parents are very keen to kind of hide what’s going on in their lives from you,” said Gabe Whitney, a district attendance specialist. “That’s the difficulty of our roles, is trying to figure out exactly why the students are gone.”

New Mexico’s Santa Fe schools created a special ‘Q’ code — which didn’t count as an absence — to indicate when a student tested positive for COVID or had been sent home with COVID symptoms. But officials think the code was underused and some students who should have been marked as ‘Q’ racked up absences.

What schools are most worried about is students missing school because they are uninterested or unwilling to attend. But the line between the disengagement and COVID issues isn’t always clear either, Chang noted.

“Let’s imagine a child, they’re quarantined for 10 days,” she said. “They were in chemistry, and now they don’t come back because they feel so far behind. Was that due to quarantine, or not?”

Districts look for better data to understand absenteeism

Some districts are moving toward collecting the kind of data that notes why students are absent and who most needs extra outreach.

Santa Fe schools purchased a new attendance-tracking system that makes it easier to spot racial or other disparities.

Schools in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg County are launching a new system this month that will flag students trending toward chronic absenteeism — but if a student is simply out sick, that label will drop off once they’ve returned to school for a bit.

And Fargo is using a new system that sorts students into different tiers based on attendance data that updates daily.

“We’re able to click a button and get real-time data,” said Tamara Uselman, Fargo’s director of equity and inclusion. “We also know for whom the system is working well, and for whom we need to make some changes.”

With that detailed data in hand, school officials say they’re more quickly able to get support to students missing the most class time.

In Santa Fe, after a student is gone a few days, a teacher calls home to check in. But when absences start piling up, school attendance teams and an expanded team of attendance coaches step in with strategies like family meetings and home visits.

“We are going to the home and saying: ‘Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while and we’re really worried about you and want you back in school,’” said Crystal Ybarra, the district’s chief equity, diversity, and engagement officer, who is overseeing the attendance initiative. Staff are also trying to figure out: “What is happening that has prevented you from going, and let’s see if we can get some ideas for how to fix this.”

Other findings in the research conducted by Liu and Monica Lee, of Brown University, suggest that efforts to improve school climate and culture could be a promising way to combat absenteeism.

By combining attendance and student survey data, Liu and Lee found that students who accumulated unexcused absences more quickly were also more likely to feel like they didn’t belong at school and were getting less academic help than their peers.

Chang has noticed more districts paying attention to those dynamics and helping students build nurturing relationships with adults as part of their attendance initiatives.

In Fargo, where the chronic absenteeism rate shot up to 30% last year — nearly three times higher than pre-pandemic — staff noticed even higher rates of absenteeism for Native American and Black students. To Uselman, that disparity signaled the need to improve school culture.

So with the help of COVID funds, the district hired a cultural specialist who works with teachers to make sure Native history is taught accurately and that Native perspectives are regularly included in lessons. And the district added a writers workshop run by two Black instructors that’s been popular with Black students.

The district’s two attendance specialists are also meeting with students who’ve missed a lot of class time to ask how their school could help.

“A lot of kids that are absent in school, they may be behind in the class, really feel like they don’t have a place in the class, or the teacher doesn’t understand them or respect them as the person they are. And that creates issues where they don’t want to be in those classes,” said Nick Hawkins, one of Fargo’s specialists. “It all begins with respect and feeling welcomed and feeling understood.”

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

NYC principals with enrollment shortfalls brace for more budget cuts

2022-10-07T18:44:23+00:00

Even as many New York City schools reel from this summer’s budget cuts, some principals are bracing for another financial hit.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, schools with enrollment shortfalls will have to pay back money midway through the school year. Education department budget directors warned many schools last week that they may have to let go of, or “excess,” teachers to achieve hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings through what’s known as the “midyear budget adjustment,” multiple principals told Chalkbeat.

Some principals sent teachers packing weeks into the new school year, while others warned staff that more cuts could be coming. Still others are opting not to make any more cuts this year and take on a budget deficit. But that decision could worsen their long-term financial outlook and bring additional spending restrictions for the rest of this school year.

“Principals are kind of between this rock and a hard place,” said one Brooklyn school leader who will likely owe more than $200,000 to the education department this school year, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a significant amount of money.

“What I’ve chosen to do is not excess anybody and see where the cookie crumbles,” said the Brooklyn principal.

Principals receive their midyear budget adjustment —which takes away money from schools whose enrollment falls short of projections and adds money to those with more students than predicted — typically each fall after enrollment counts are finalized on Oct. 31, and again later in the winter.

The midyear adjustment is meant to address any student roster imbalances from the budgets issued in June, which are based on education department projections for the coming school year. When schools end up with fewer students on their rosters than projected or have students with extremely low attendance rates they can lose per pupil funding for those kids midway through the school year. That amounts to more than $4,000 a student for a general education high school student and up to nearly $12,000 a head for students with disabilities, who receive extra funding, according to DOE figures.

The midyear clawback was paused for the past two school years because of the pandemic, and its return could bring more financial pain and disruption for some schools still reeling from the effects of a first round of enrollment-based budget cuts over the summer.

At some schools, the midyear belt tightening has already taken a toll — even though it’s only about a month into the school year.

The principal of P.S. 222 in Jackson Heights, Queens, told parents last week that “due to…declining enrollment it has become necessary to reorganize our first grade classes at this time. The reorganization entails the elimination of your child’s class,” according to a copy of the principal’s letter posted by Susan Kang, a parent in the eliminated class.

Kang said her son was devastated to lose the teacher he’d spent weeks getting to know, and worried that the disruption would increase behavior challenges and slow down academic progress.

“Young children this age bond with their teachers very quickly,” Kang said. “I imagine there’s going to be more behavioral issues because of this change … it seems unnecessarily cruel.”

At one Bronx middle school, four teachers were excessed just this week, the teachers union confirmed.

“It’s really disruptive to the kids,” said one staffer at the school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And then you have the rest of the staff, now we have four less people for coverages.”

The fact that the departures happened nearly a month into the year, after the school had already spent weeks “establishing routines,” made it particularly jarring, the staffer added.

The education department declined to say how much money schools with enrollment shortfalls are expected to have to pay back or how many teachers have been excessed since the school year started. Excessed teachers remain on the education department payroll, but have to find a job at a different school.

Education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said “under the terms of our labor agreements, teachers must be notified by Sept. 30 that they may be required to take a role at another school due to enrollment shifts. If there is the possibility of an enrollment-driven staffing adjustment, principals often utilize this notification as a way to responsibly plan ahead.”

But long-time Queens high school principal Mike Athy, who recently retired after 14 years, said in his experience it’s “unusual” for so many principals to be grappling with the possibility of excessing as part of the midyear budget adjustment.

“In my particular case, I never issued a September excess letter in 14 years,” he said, adding that he’s heard from several principals in recent weeks who said they were encouraged to issue excess notices.

For schools facing big enrollment shortfalls, the midyear clawbacks can force principals to choose among what feels like a set of bad options.

One Bronx principal was notified two weeks ago that he will owe the education department about $750,000 due to enrolling roughly 75 fewer students than expected. That would mean excessing seven to eight teachers who he just hired this summer after a wave of departures. He’s planning to shift the debt to next year, even though district officials have urged him against it.

“It would literally destroy the school’s programs, not to mention excess all the new teachers we brought in who have brought fresh energy, fresh blood and new life to the school,” said the principal, who runs one of the city’s community schools, which serve larger shares of high-needs students.

Other principals said they’re also determined not to excess any staff midway through the school year, and are planning to carry forward a budget deficit into next year instead. Some school leaders are waiting and hoping that the education department will forgive the debt, as happened last year.

A few principals are pounding the pavement, trying to recruit new students before the Oct. 31 enrollment count.

The Bronx principal said since receiving a letter about his $750,000 deficit, about 10 new students have enrolled, bringing his debt down by roughly $100,000. In hopes of enrolling more children, he plans to spend the rest of the month promoting the school “on social media, getting brochures, getting flyers on to the streets.”

But taking on a budget deficit comes with its own risks, said Athy, the former principal.

Education department budget officials need to approve the arrangement, and can impose restrictions like limiting spending on after-school programs for schools that go into the red, Athy said.

Still, for many principals, that’s a more appealing prospect than cutting staff midway through the school year.

On the other end of the enrollment stick, schools with more students than projected get extra funding through the midyear adjustment. But the extra cash comes late enough into the school year that it can be difficult to spend effectively, Athy said.

It can be difficult to hire new teachers midway through the year, and plugging new hires into a schedule that’s already set can cause more disruption.

Making matters more complicated, the education department often doesn’t announce whether schools with budget surpluses can roll their extra money into next year until the spring, upping the pressure on principals to spend the cash right away.

“If you’re a principal and beat the projection … you don’t know whether or not you should roll that forward into the next fiscal year, or … buy all the copy paper in North America,” Athy said.

Loading…

If you are having trouble viewing this form, go here.

Reema Amin contributed.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring grants of up to $1,000 for Indiana students to roll out Oct. 15

2022-10-05T20:11:23+00:00

Eligible students at six Indiana school districts will be able to access $1,000 for tutoring services beginning Oct. 15, according to a Wednesday presentation from the state department of education.

Several more districts are awaiting clearance to join the state’s new program, known as Indiana Learns, which provides families at least $500 to use toward math and reading tutoring. Districts can provide another $250 for their students that the state will then match, for a total tutoring grant of $1,000.

The tutoring program, first created by House Enrolled Act 1251 in the spring and funded through federal relief dollars, is Indiana’s take on using tutoring to make up for the academic losses of the COVID-19 pandemic — a popular approach nationwide.

It’s open to fourth and fifth graders who qualify for federally subsidized meals and scored below proficiency on both the reading and math portions of the state test, ILEARN. Those students are eligible for the $500 grants from the state even if their school doesn’t match the funds.

“This is a nationally unique program in the way Indiana structured it, so we’re very excited to get started and learn some things in this pilot phase, too,” said Kristin Grimmie, senior vice president of strategy at The Mind Trust, which operates the program.

Beginning on Oct. 15, families can access their accounts at indianalearns.org, where they’ll be able to check their eligibility and the amount of money they’ll receive. They can also use the platform to schedule services with approved providers.

The response to the program in its initial months has been positive, with Secretary of Education Katie Jenner noting that no school district so far has declined the chance to participate. Indiana Learns hopes to have 3,000 students participating and 20 schools matching grants by December 2022 before a wider launch in January. Schools and districts are eligible to match the funds, according to the law.

The school districts that are providing matching grants so far include Gary, Greenwood, Knox, Penn-Harris-Madison, Mishawaka, and Wawasee, according to the state’s presentation.

Seana Murphy, senior director of Indiana Learns, said the three districts that first announced they would match the grant — Indianapolis Public Schools, Muncie, and Decatur Township — are “in the process” of being added to that list.

Murphy said the program currently has 68 additional applications in the queue, from both school districts that wish to participate and private providers seeking to offer tutoring services.

Indiana Learns uses a nine-member committee to approve tutoring providers who wish to participate, according to the presentation to the state Board of Education.

A handful of private providers like Sylvan Learning Centers and Varsity Tutors have already been cleared to provide services under the grants. Some school districts are also providing tutoring services using their own teaching staff, like Knox schools, which will offer in-person tutoring with certified teachers to its 25 eligible students.

Those students will receive a minimum of 20 1-hour tutoring sessions funded by around $6,000 from the district and $19,000 from the Indiana Learns grant.

“This is really giving school corporations additional resources to be able to support those activities,” Grimmie said of the grants.

One challenge will be making families who qualify for the program aware of the funds, especially in larger school districts that serve more students who might qualify.

Grimmie said The Mind Trust will send mailers to students who qualify, as well as encourage schools and teachers to highlight the program during parent-teacher conferences.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary of a downturn

2022-09-27T18:13:50+00:00

Grand Rapids Public Schools received $104 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding, an enormous one-time cash infusion equal to about half its annual budget.

The district used the money for tutoring, extra summer programs, and coaching for teachers. But now, facing an uncertain economy and the expiration date of the federal funds, the district is shifting its focus from spending to saving.

“Yes, we have a lot of money right now, but it is one-time money,” said Rhonda Kribs, chief financial officer of Grand Rapids Public Schools. “We’re on a cliff, so we need to be planning for what the district looks like in two years.”

That’s not quite what federal policymakers had in mind when they sent $6.2 billion in COVID relief funding to bolster Michigan’s education system. They wanted districts to spend the money on urgent needs like addressing the academic and emotional toll of the pandemic, which is why they set a fall 2024 deadline for the last of the spending.

Districts have already spent $1.6 billion of the federal aid to support students and shore up crumbling school infrastructure, and they’ve laid plans to spend billions more. Loose federal guidelines allow districts to use their aid to help build up savings, said Tom DeKeyser, superintendent of Whitmore Lake Public Schools. “But the needs of the students are so great.”

Yet Grand Rapids and many other districts are calculating that it’s just as critical to bolster their reserves while they can, and protect against future funding cuts that could destabilize children’s education again. They’re heeding warnings from school finance experts of a “perfect storm” of economic uncertainty fueled by inflation, enrollment declines, the threat of recession, and expiring federal aid.

“This year and probably the next school year look pretty healthy. But the medium term looks a lot scarier,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab, a nonpartisan think tank based at Georgetown University, adding: “How do we make investments that respond to the needs of today without putting districts in a hole in a few short years?”

How districts choose to allocate their resources during this unusual period of plenty could play a big role in determining how successfully they can support students through the profound challenges left by the pandemic, and whether they’re able to get through future fiscal crises without a new round of disruption.

For some administrators who witnessed painful cuts after the Great Recession, it’s a no-brainer to put away some money while school budgets are at a historic highwater mark.

“I’ve lived through two times when the state cut school funding,” Lou Steigerwald, superintendent of Norway Vulcan Area Schools in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said in an email. “Schools with no or little (fund balance) had to borrow money and slash staff and other items in their budgets.”

Indeed, Michigan’s most financially troubled districts, which were battered by the Great Recession, have been able to wipe out deficits and bolster their fund balances during the pandemic, allowing them to exit state oversight.

In a time of enormous academic needs, though, the tilt toward savings has some people worried that students will be shortchanged. For parents of students who struggled with virtual learning and other pandemic-related disruptions, it can be hard to accept anything but an aggressive spending plan from school districts.

“I have a kid who’s struggling, so it’s frustrating,” said Heidi Gates, parent of two children at Brighton Area Schools, where the fund balance jumped from $8 million pre-pandemic to a projected $14.7 million this year. “I feel like schools are saying, ‘OK, we’re back to normal.’”

Others warn that this caution could feed a public perception that districts are sitting on federal dollars meant for students — a perception that could come back to haunt the school system in coming funding fights.

“The school rescue funds were designed to help students now,” said Thomas Morgan, a spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “For that to happen, the money needs to be spent, and not sit in the bank. I know administrators will say they’re saving money for a rainy day, but it’s raining now.”

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Savings on the rise

School funding experts often use fund balances — sometimes called reserves or a “rainy day fund” — as a proxy for districts’ financial health. In broad terms, a district’s fund balance is what’s left over after a district has done all of its spending for the year.

A large fund balance functions as a cushion in the event of funding cuts or an unexpected problem with a school building. Districts with small fund balances typically face higher costs to borrow through the bond market. A negative fund balance — which means a district can’t cover its bills for the year — triggers state oversight, and can eventually lead to districts being shuttered or taken over by the state.

After one year of the pandemic, fund balances across Michigan school districts skyrocketed.

By summer 2021, when the most recent audited school finance data was released, the combined reserves of Michigan school districts had grown by 37%, from $2.4 billion pre-pandemic to $3.3 billion, according to the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan think tank.

Michigan school leaders are counseled to maintain fund balances equal to 15% to 20% of their expenditures. Last year, for the first time in at least a decade, more than half of districts had fund balance ratios of more than 20%. The number of districts above that threshold rose to 438 from 263, a two-thirds increase.

“Schools are as flush as they’ve ever been in history,” said Craig Thiel, research director for the CRC.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

Superintendents pointed to numerous reasons that reserves increased. Virtual learning brought savings on school bus fuel and heating. At the same time, the state sharply increased per pupil funding and changed its funding policies to help districts with declining enrollment.

Others emphasized that reserves were boosted by transitory pandemic-related factors like school shutdowns and supply chain disruptions. In Grand Rapids, for example, Kribs said that supply chain issues forced the district to delay purchasing new security vehicles, inflating the district’s fund balance.

The most widely cited explanation, however, was the $6.2 billion in federal COVID aid that is being sent directly to school districts to help them deal with the effects of the pandemic.

In interviews and survey responses, 21 Michigan superintendents — echoing their counterparts nationwide — said it has been difficult to spend the extra funds. A tight labor market has slowed hiring, and many superintendents were reluctant in any case to expand their staffs using funds that will expire within a few years.

Some said the increased fund balances are only temporary while districts save for major expenses that are coming up soon, such as school renovations. Still, many argued that putting some money away now is just good policy given the risks they face in the next two years from inflation, declining enrollment, and the expiration of the federal relief dollars.

The state school budget reached record highs this year, but superintendents worry that a recession could reverse that trend. And even if the state budget remains strong, many districts will still see their revenues fall sharply, particularly those in high-poverty areas that received the most federal aid. For instance, the Lansing School District is in line to receive about $10 million extra under the latest state budget, but it received $142 million in federal aid.

“Fund balance allows for the consistency of programming in good times and bad,” said Robert Dwan, deputy executive director of Michigan School Business Officials, a trade association that provides financial training and support to district officials.

“Having a healthy fund balance which may help support the district in poor economic times helps fulfill the district’s responsibility to ensure today’s kindergartener graduates with as little disruption as possible throughout their educational journey,” Dwan added.

Flash in the pan or long-term plan?

It’s important to note that districts are not simply depositing their federal aid in the bank.

Under the laws governing that aid, that money is supposed to go exclusively to COVID-19 relief and can’t be channeled directly into reserves. But broad spending guidelines for the funds meant districts were able to apply the federal aid to some of their normal operating costs — things like laptop computers, building repairs, and some teacher salaries — and then direct some of the unspent operating funds into savings.

While available data don’t show how much districts spent on new programs, it’s clear that many schools upped their summer school offerings, expanded mental health services, and trained teachers and bought new curriculums to support students’ academic recovery.

With the federal funds expiring, district leaders said there’s a real danger that overspending now could make matters worse for students and teachers if their districts ended up in a budget hole in a few years.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

“It’s a fine line, because this money was meant to accelerate learning that was disrupted due to COVID, but at the same time, if you’re able to build a fund balance, then I could see districts doing that,” said Nathan Kalasho, director of Keys Grace Academy, a charter school in suburban Detroit.

Still, some superintendents pushed back on the notion that districts’ long-term financial health changed significantly during the pandemic, arguing that district reserves will drop back to normal levels when federal COVID-19 relief expires in 2024.

“The growth of our fund balance is temporary and directly correlates with the one-time federal funding that must be spent by specific deadlines,” said C. Martin James, superintendent of Central Montcalm Public Schools, a rural district in central Michigan.

Indeed, some districts have already laid plans to spend down their reserves within a few years. Consider the Detroit Public Schools Community District, where the fund balance is projected to skyrocket from $101 million in 2021 to $788 million in 2024. Most of that additional money — $700 million — will then be used to fund a long overdue overhaul of the districts’ school buildings.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

Whitmore Lake is in ‘spending mode’

In the suburbs north of Ann Arbor, Whitmore Lake Public Schools has been spending aggressively on a coaching program for teachers and additional classroom aides to help offset the academic impacts of the pandemic. While the district’s fund balance rose thanks to federal COVID-19 relief, the district is still operating in “spending mode,” said DeKeyser, the superintendent.

Behind that spending, said DeKeyser, is a bet that the district can find a way to shore up its finances later on when the federal money dries up.

Years ago, Whitmore Lake made a similar bet — and lost. During the Great Recession, when he was an assistant superintendent, DeKeyser watched Whitmore Lake spend down its federal relief funds in anticipation of additional support from the state or the federal government. But the additional help didn’t come.

“In 2009 we got to the end of our [stimulus] funds and it was like ‘Oh, what do we do now?’” he said.

This time, the answer for Whitmore Lake is retirements. DeKeyser says he’s anticipating staff turnover of about 50% over the next four years. By not filling some positions, he hopes to downsize the district’s budget enough to keep its finances stable after the federal aid expires.

But he knows there are no guarantees for his district and others statewide.

“If we maintain this spending, things could get catastrophic,” he said. “Any time you get a federal boost like this, you can look good in the short term. But it’s how you look four years out that defines how well you’re managing your funds.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

With COVID aid, schools try something new: giving students jobs

2022-09-27T11:00:00+00:00

Kelly King was able to do something this summer she’d never been able to before: pay students to help others.

King, who works for the school district on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, used federal COVID aid to hire three rising high school seniors to staff a booth at a riverside park. There, as crowds flocked to a farmers market and free concerts, the students told residents how local schools could help families experiencing homelessness and offer other kinds of support.

The high schoolers, each of whom had experienced homelessness themselves, earned just over $10 an hour for the community engagement work. For two of the teens, it was their first paid job.

“We were very intentional about doing things that had not been done before,” King said. She noticed that the work taught the students customer service and financial skills, and when students reflected on their experience, they said it boosted their confidence, too. The paid job “made them think more positively about what was possible for their futures,” King said.

Across the U.S., schools are using their influx of COVID relief money in an innovative but overlooked way: to offer paying jobs to students. Programs like the one in Alaska are an example of how the funding is allowing schools to get creative with how they offer direct help to young people and expose them to new career paths — benefiting both teens looking for work and schools in need of staff.

“More career preparation, or even thinking about careers, is quite a good thing at early ages,” said Mary Elizabeth Collins, a professor at Boston University who has studied workforce development for vulnerable youth. “There are a lot of potential career pathways available to young people, and we as a society don’t do a great job of letting them know the range of things that they could go for, and what they need to get there.”

School leaders say the money is especially helpful for teens who can’t afford an unpaid internship, or who are struggling to balance their schoolwork with a late-night part-time job. If teens are working as tutors or mentors, the jobs also provide an academic and emotional boost for students’ younger peers. To work best, programs should offer students plenty of adult guidance, especially if they are working with younger children, Collins said.

When the Houston school district launched a peer tutoring initiative with iEducate, a local nonprofit, officials there specifically targeted students interested in education. Using COVID relief funds, the district is paying its high schoolers and local college students, many of whom are recent graduates, $14 an hour or more to tutor elementary schoolers.

It gives tutors “an opportunity to build those relationships with our scholars, to help with that learning loss from COVID in our schools,” said Joseph Williams, a district administrator who oversees the tutoring initiative. “It also gives them that experience to see what teaching is about, and hopefully build a pipeline of future teachers.”

The district has hired student tutors in the past, but the new funding dramatically expanded the support the district could offer. This summer, high schoolers and recent grads worked with 21,000 elementary schoolers, and the tutors are getting ongoing training in skills like managing a classroom and lesson-planning.

So far Houston schools have paid $560,000 to their student tutors, and officials budgeted another $2 million for the upcoming school year. Some 200 tutors will be working in schools as of next week, and the district is still looking for several hundred more.

In Tacoma, Washington, the district is spending $450,000 in federal relief on a jobs program that pays teens to coach elementary school sports and to tutor their younger peers.

Before the pandemic, students could volunteer to coach, but now high schoolers can be paid $1,000 for six weeks of work, with the district and city splitting the cost. That’s opening up the job to students who wanted to coach before but couldn’t afford an unpaid role.

The district also is paying high schoolers a $500 stipend to tutor elementary schoolers in math and English after school. Officials piloted the initiative with 34 student tutors last year, and plan to expand it this year. Tutors get specific training on how to help younger students with their homework in those areas.

“We’re not just dropping students in and saying ‘OK, go tutor,’” said Kathryn McCarthy, a spokesperson for Tacoma schools. “Our goal was just to think about: What can we do to help students who are interested in the profession of teaching gain some depth of knowledge? So really focusing on how to provide some instruction.”

Not all new jobs initiatives have that educational component. Faced with staffing shortages, some schools have started hiring students to work in cafeterias or maintain school grounds, NBC News reported last month — jobs typically held by adults that some educators fear are less likely to serve students’ career ambitions.

“Rather than treating it as low-paid labor,” said Jake Leos-Urbel, who has researched New York City’s summer youth jobs program, schools should be “treating it as an educational, youth development experience, and thinking about the adults who are going to mentor and support youth in that work.”

That’s the approach being taken by Memphis-Shelby County schools, where officials are using federal COVID money to offer students paid internships within the district and at local businesses.

Lori Phillips, who heads the district’s student, family, and community affairs work, said the initiative helps fill several gaps. While there are several summer work programs in the area, few offer job exposure during the school year. And at $15 an hour, the program also pays more than the fast food jobs many teens have, without any late-night schedules — so students can stay on top of their homework and participate in extracurricular activities.

The initiative also includes Saturday training sessions where students dress up in business clothes and work in small groups with local leaders on skills like interviewing and setting up a bank account.

The district had wanted to launch something like this for some time, but the federal COVID money sped up the work, and made it more equitable, too.

“You may have some businesses that are interested in hosting two or three students, but they may not be financially equipped to be able to pay those students,” Phillips said. “We wanted to make sure that regardless of where you are, all students are getting paid the same amount.”

The district spent about $360,000 to pilot the program last school year and this summer — employing more than 1,000 students — and has set aside at least $1 million to expand the initiative this year. Phillips hopes 1,000 students can get internships each of the fall, winter, and spring sessions.

The federal funds have also meant that schools can pay students for their expertise.

In Virginia’s Roanoke City Public Schools, Malora Horn set aside COVID relief money to hire a peer support specialist to work in the district office that supports homeless students and families. The specialist, who experienced homelessness as a young person, will recruit students to serve on a new homeless youth advisory council. Often these kinds of roles are unpaid, but Horn plans to offer students a stipend or gift cards to participate.

“This gives them a safe place to have them share their thoughts and ideas of other services that they may be needing, or challenges that they’re having that maybe we haven’t thought of,” Horn said.

Teens who’ve gotten to participate in these programs say they’re grateful for hands-on work experience.

As part of Houston’s program, 19-year-old Leonardo Cuellar has been tutoring students at an elementary school not far from where he grew up, while balancing college classes. It’s been a chance to test out teaching with a safety net, since he’s partnered with a classroom teacher.

Over the last year, he’s worked with small groups of students on their math and reading skills in both English and Spanish. When his struggling second graders improved in math, his partner teacher told him it was thanks to the weeks he’d spent helping them practice skills like subtraction on a mini whiteboard.

“This has made me sure that I wanted to do this,” Cuellar said. “When I was a kid, I didn’t have that help, so being that person to be able to help them really feels good.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

3-K is getting the bulk of NYC’s school stimulus funding. But Adams might curb its expansion.

2022-09-22T13:32:13+00:00

When New York City schools received more than $7 billion in federal stimulus money last year, city officials planned to spend more than a quarter of it on one of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature initiatives: expanding preschool for 3-year-olds.

His administration, however, never outlined how the city would pay for the program once those federal dollars ran out by the 2025-26 school year, only saying that he felt confident the economy would bounce back by then.

Now, as Mayor Eric Adams stares down a potential $10 billion budget shortfall when federal dollars dry up in three years, observers are concerned that the city may not have enough money to pay for the growing program.

City officials declined to say whether they wanted to make preschool universal for 3-year-olds as de Blasio had planned, instead saying that the education department was “committed to optimizing access to care, as based on family need and preference, for ages birth to five.”

And the mayor and his schools chief, David Banks, seem to have their own agenda that Adams campaigned on: making care for children under 3 more affordable for low-income families, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

That could leave many families who are banking on child care and early learning for their 3-year-olds without subsidized options, according to budget watchdogs and organizations that represent preschool providers.

“The concern is really, if you’re offering a service that’s gonna be expected to be recurring, you need to tie down funding for it,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan budget watchdog nonprofit.

Officials did not say how they plan to pay for the popular program once federal relief dollars run out nor have they shared plans to scale back stimulus spending.

“Federal stimulus dollars will eventually sunset, and we look forward to working with our partners from all levels of government towards a sustainable path forward for investing in high-quality Early Childhood Education programs,” education department spokesperson Suzan Sumer said in a statement.

Need for affordable child care

De Blasio began opening free preschool programs for 3-year-olds in 2017, after successfully launching universal preschool for 4-year-olds. Using federal stimulus dollars, the city opened 3-K seats in every community school district last year.

Prekindergarten for 3-year-olds was the only grade where enrollment actually grew last year, more than doubling from the year before, as the city opened more seats.

Last year, the city offered more than 46,000 3-K seats, a figure that includes spots that are funded by federal dollars, and filled about 38,000 of them. The city was expected to open about 8,000 more this school year, according to the education department.

Nathaniel Styer, a spokesperson for the education department, tweeted that there are neighborhoods where many seats go unfilled, while in others, there are not enough to meet demand. For example, this year, Southwest Brooklyn had 1,054 available 3K seats and 53 left unfilled. But in the Bronx’s High Bridge and Morrisania, just under half of the 2,400 open seats had been filled.

Rebecca Iwerks, who lives in East Harlem with her husband and three children, enrolled her 3-year-old daughter in a city-funded program near their home. Before this year, she and her husband, who both work, were paying for daycare that cost nearly as much as their rent.

Iwerks’ daughter has “been really happy,” waking up each morning asking if she’s going to school. She seems to have been talking more there, Iwerks said.

“Having a more affordable child care option for her is a huge game-changer for us,” Iwerks said.

Several studies have found that preschool is beneficial for children. A 2019 study out of South Carolina found that children who attended public preschool programs had higher test scores in grades 3-5, improving the academic environment for their peers, too. The students who attended the program were also less likely to be disciplined. Another study found that the siblings and children of students who attended preschool did better academically, had better employment outcomes, and were less likely to be involved with crime.

However, a national 2018 study challenged that narrative: It found that public preschool didn’t lead to higher test scores in fourth grade, but there were gains for children in districts with majority Black students.

3-K gets lion’s share of COVID relief money

When federal COVID dollars rolled in, city officials planned to use $2 billion of it on expanding 3-K through the 2024-25 school year. It was the single largest use of the district’s stimulus dollars over time, according to an analysis last year from the Independent Budget Office, or the IBO. De Blasio had planned to make the program universal by next school year.

The problem, budget watchdogs have warned, starts in July 2025, when federal aid will run out. By then, the city will face a $376 million shortfall for 3-K and has not pointed to a funding source to cover the whole program, according to a budget tracker by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. That’s part of the roughly $840 million budget shortfall that the education department will face in 2025 because of programs it has funded using federal stimulus funds.

While stimulus spending on pre-K is increasing each year, the city is spending less on academic recovery for K-12 schools, including for extra services for students with disabilities, as the federal money dries up. The city is also spending less of these funds overall on school budgets due to projected declining enrollment.

Of the roughly 5,000 districts tracked by Future Ed, an education thinktank out of Georgetown University, 225 districts and charters are spending stimulus dollars on preschool or early education — though none at the level of New York City, according to Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Future Ed.

School districts are allowed to use the federal relief on expanding preschool programs, said a spokesperson for the state education department, which signed off on the city’s planned use of COVID dollars. Signaling support for the city’s plan, the spokesperson said that expanding pre-K programs “addresses lost early childhood learning, socialization, and other foundational skills required for long-term success.”

The huge investment of federal dollars drew mixed feelings from Nora Moran, director of policy at United Neighborhood Houses, which represents preschool providers. The city has addressed something that “is a huge issue for working parents” and good for young children, Moran said, but her organization was concerned about using temporary dollars to prop it up.

They raised the issue with the de Blasio administration, only to be told that the economy would rebound, she said. If it doesn’t, community-based providers might have to cut back programs.

“I think it would be probably a catastrophe for a lot of providers and families if you’re seeing a loss of programs,” said Gregory Brender, policy director for the Day Care Council, which also represents preschool programs. “Families end up scrambling, you have workers losing their jobs.”

Expanding smartly

Even as policy analysts worry about the program’s future, they also want the city to focus on a program that actually works for families. Both Moran and Brender noted that most preschool classrooms run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., which mirrors the school day but doesn’t cover families who work later. It doesn’t offer the sort of after-school programs that might be available for students in older grades. Moran noted that there are some federally funded preschool seats that go until 6 p.m., but those are in the minority and reserved for low-income families.

Iwerks, the East Harlem mother, still pays for aftercare for her daughter — albeit, at a fraction of the cost – that goes until 5:30 p.m. She feels lucky that the after-school program is located in the same church as her daughter’s 3-K.

“It’s a good question about how all this investment is happening and who’s able to benefit from it if you can’t get child care for a pre-K kid after 3 o’clock,” Iwerks said.

Brender, of the Day Care Council, said that any cuts to the program may invite intense budget fights down the road, and the city must make tough choices about what to do next.

“But we know that families are still desperate for early childhood options, and we do think it’s going to be popular enough where hopefully the city and state would work to continue it,” Brender said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

COVID relief money helps Colorado schools pay for math and reading curriculum

2022-09-21T23:50:25+00:00

Dozens of Colorado school districts and charter schools are buying new math and reading curriculum with help from $10 million in federal pandemic relief.

State officials announced Wednesday that 42 districts and 28 charter schools will receive grants to purchase reading curriculum for early elementary grades and math curriculum for elementary and middle school.

The $10 million is a small chunk of the $180 million set aside for state-level efforts to help schools with COVID recovery. More than $1.5 billion in additional federal relief funding went directly to school districts.

The curriculum grants come at a time when many Colorado districts are adopting new K-3 reading curriculum to comply with a 2019 state law that requires them to use programs backed by research on how children learn to read. While there’s no similar law covering math curriculum, education department rules say the grants can only be used for certain math programs — specifically, those that earned top “green” ratings from EdReports, a national curriculum reviewer.

In addition to Colorado’s reading law, efforts to reverse pandemic learning loss have fed the push to replace old or ineffective curriculum. Such programs can be pricey and districts typically can afford to replace them only every six or seven years.

State curriculum grants went to a variety of large and small districts that serve larger numbers of students with high needs, for example those who come from low-income families, are dual language learners, or spent a lot of time in remote learning during the pandemic. Among the large districts receiving the grants are Jeffco Public Schools, Adams 12 Five Star Schools, Colorado Springs District 11, and Greeley-Evans District 6.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado has big gaps in who finishes college. Can a post-pandemic push turn the tide?

2022-09-15T12:00:00+00:00

Leer en español.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores knew finishing college would be an uphill battle.

As the first in his family to go to a four-year university, he faced a struggle to pay tuition, buy textbooks and supplies, and balance a job while still helping to support his parents, who questioned the value of a college education.

Haro-Flores enrolled at the University of Northern Colorado in 2016, among a growing number of Latino Coloradans in the past decade heading to college. But like many in this wave, Haro-Flores never finished, contributing to the persistent gap in college completion.

Even as a more diverse group of students have enrolled in college, Colorado’s ethnic and racial gaps among bachelor’s and graduate degree holders barely budged from 2010 to 2020, Census data shows.

The gaps are even wider among those earning any type of postsecondary credential. As of 2020, almost 60% of white residents held some kind of college credential, including industry certificates. But only 38% of Black residents and 25% of Latino residents did.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores, 24, is back at the University of Northern Colorado after several tries at finishing his degree.

While other states also have gaps, the Centennial State has some of the largest in the nation between Black and Latino residents and their white counterparts.

The fissure will likely widen when the full impact of the pandemic becomes clear as students dropped out or chose not to attend college altogether. A healthy job market also has made residents question whether a degree was worth carrying long-term college debt.

Haro-Flores never expected his journey to mirror these state trends. In 2018, struggling to pay tuition, he dropped out of college. His parents’ immigration status meant his financial aid options were limited. He re-enrolled at UNC in 2019, but the pandemic forced him to quit again. He disliked online classes and wanted to work full time to help his parents, who had been laid off from seasonal jobs in warehouses and nurseries.

For some time, Colorado has wanted to shift away from importing a large number of educated workers to producing them. Part of its strategy includes earmarking $49 million in federal pandemic relief money to identify students who left school without finishing and help them complete their degree.

The need is pressing, as the demand for more workers with college training and Colorado’s sharply rising cost of living have complicated employers’ efforts to recruit and retain employees.

Former State Sen. Mike Johnston said the state has relied too long on bringing in talent from elsewhere.

“We’ve ridden that strategy as long as we can,” Johnston said. He is president and CEO of Gary Ventures, a philanthropy dedicated to helping increase school readiness, youth success, and economic mobility.

“We’re going to have to now prepare our own young people with the skills they need to enter the jobs we have, that will give them the income they need to pay for the housing we have,” he said.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores raises his hand during a sports management class this month at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

The old challenges collide with the new

Chalkbeat Colorado examined college-going trends as a part of Chasing Progress, a Colorado News Collaborative project on social, economic, and health equity among Black and Latino Coloradans.

Colorado’s low college-going rates have deep roots and complicated causes. Only half of all high school graduates enroll in college at all. Black and Latino high school graduates, who often attend under-resourced schools and have less support, go at much lower rates. When they get to college, many never finish. And the state has underfunded higher education for years, which means schools have less money to support students to graduation.

Census data released this year shows that in 2020, 48% of white residents held a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s 21 percentage points higher than the portion of Black adults and 31 percentage points higher than Latinos.

State data shows those disparities grow when comparing other types of college training, such as industry certificates and associate degrees.

Colorado is aiming to get some of the 700,000 residents who have some college but no degree back on campus.

The pandemic still poses challenges. Nationally, college enrollment has dipped by nearly 1 million students since COVID hit.

The state will need to persuade more residents that college matters, even though entry-level jobs now offer wages that are higher than ever.

More people question the value of college and the risk of high debt for it, said Iris Palmer, New America’s deputy director of community colleges. The research institute advocates for equitable access to education.

“That’s starting to erode how people think of higher education,” she said.

The state aims to equip 66% of residents with a college certificate or higher by 2025, but the compounding issues make the goal seem more elusive than ever.

Without access to higher-paying jobs, the majority of Black, Hispanic, and Native American Colorado residents are getting left behind, said Courtney Brown, Lumina Foundation vice president of impact and planning. The foundation pushes for more equitable access to higher education and has helped states set goals. (Lumina is a funder of Chalkbeat. See our funders here and read our ethics policy here.)

Reginaldo Haro-Flores, right, shakes the hand of freshman Alexis Vallejos-Diaz, whom he is mentoring at the University of Northern Colorado campus.

How to get students to finish what they started

Colorado leaders are taking steps to create more opportunity.

The state has encouraged high schools to add college-level classes to help students earn certificates. It created a scholarship in 2014 to offer tuition assistance and other support for students needing it.

In the past two years, the state named a statewide equity officer to focus on narrowing persistent gaps and convened lawmakers and community leaders to come up with a plan to tap into pandemic relief money to connect college students to jobs.

While those programs show success, the state still falls short, said Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione.

That’s why the state has added more programs. They show promise, Palmer said. For example, 30 college campuses have adopted Finish What You Started, a program modeled after a successful Pueblo Community College initiative. The state aims to serve about 9,000 students by 2026.

The program provides financial aid for students to return to college and coaching to figure out individual college plans, as well as ways to stick to them and find a job after college. Coaches also help students find help on and off campus that could put food on the table or care for children.

While money is a huge incentive, helping students believe they can finish college is vital, said Richie Ince, director of the Pueblo model called Return to Earn. He and his employees check in on each student every other week to offer advice, encouragement, or connections to resources.

“I think we’re really successful because of that personal touch and just kind of looking out for them, really from the time they come back to the time they finish,” Ince said.

The Finish What You Started program brought Haro-Flores, now 24, back to school. He heard about it from one of his former high school advisers. The aid and counseling he’s received has felt almost too good to be true, he said.

He wouldn’t have gone back to school for a third time without the program and its funding, he said. UNC’s Finish What You Started coordinators told him they’d provide assistance for whatever he needed. That has happened, Haro-Flores said. Now he feels confident he can finish his sports exercise degree.

“This is the moment,” he said.

He hopes to graduate by 2024 and work in sports or management.

The aid that Haro-Flores has received through the Finish What You Started program at UNC has motivated him to finish his sports exercise degree.

Can Colorado sustain this effort?

Advocates say Colorado, too, must finish what it’s started in promoting college completion. The state, which studies show seriously underfunds higher education compared with other states, must continue to put in more money to stay on track.

Paccione, the state’s higher education executive director, likes to tell lawmakers, “invest in students now or pay them later.”

“If you don’t invest in the students now, these are the very students who will end up on our public safety social safety net,” she said. Studies bear that out.

Studies also show that college is worth a student’s investment. Michael Itzkowitz, who works for the left-leaning think-tank Third Way, said data in recent years allows schools to highlight how well their programs get students jobs and pay off. About 86% of all public college programs produce a return on what students spend on their education within five years, he said.

And there are also social benefits. Alfred Tatum, Metropolitan State University of Denver academic affairs vice president, said college helps students connect to health care, become more civically engaged, and contribute more to the state’s tax base. Instead of the general goal of educating the greater population, state leaders should consider instead how college graduates improve communities, he said.

But relaying those benefits to students can be difficult when some are worried about cost.

Over the past two decades, the burden of paying for college in Colorado has shifted more heavily to students and families. Tuition revenue funds 74% of undergraduate college budgets and 38% of two-year college budgets. That’s higher on average than in most states.

Janine Davidson, MSU Denver president, and John Marshall, Colorado Mesa University president, said that lawmakers must adequately fund schools so they can lower costs for students and improve support for students who need more help to finish college.

Without a consistent revenue stream, college administrators and staffers worry that Colorado’s efforts will weaken once the one-time federal money dries up.

They hope that success stories, like that of Darryl Sharpton, will drive home the importance of continuing funding.

Sharpton, 46, has tried several times in three states to finish college. At last, he thinks he can stick with it. At the Community College of Aurora, he’s found more support than he’s ever received before.

He’s studying to get a degree in computer science. College has provided him with a different outlook — about his own potential and his value.

“I want a career, not just a job,” Sharpton said, who previously worked delivering pharmaceuticals.

“There are so many people that want you to succeed,” he said. “My school is really taking care of me right now.”

Tina Griego, a Colorado News Collaborative journalist, contributed to this report.

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

IPS drops employee attendance requirement for $1,500 bonuses

2022-09-07T21:43:12+00:00

Indianapolis Public Schools is dropping a limit on the number of absences employees could have last spring in order to qualify for a $1,500 retention bonus the district will pay out this week.

The initial requirement for the bonus, which the district will pay out Friday and is one of three rounds to be distributed through September 2023, allowed staff no more than two absences after March 28. Although staff could still take personal and vacation days, those who were out sick for more than two days were not eligible for the extra money.

The bonuses are meant to help the district as it struggles to retain staff during the pandemic. They are being funded with $14 million out of roughly $214 million in federal COVID relief for IPS.

The employee attendance requirement angered teachers throughout the district who were worried about missing out on the bonus due to a positive COVID diagnosis — which required teachers to quarantine for five days.

IPS announced on Wednesday it is dropping the attendance requirement for the first bonus in an email to staff.

The district did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear whether the limit on employee absences will be dropped for two other bonus payments due in February and September 2023.

“We will continue to evaluate circumstances which may impact staff absences to determine if the attendance requirement will be enforced for the remaining two bonus opportunities,” the district said in the email.

As with bonuses the district is paying out Friday, $1,000 bonuses paid out in February 2023 will be for employees who worked through the prior fall semester and remain employed on the day of the payout, while $1,500 bonuses paid out in September 2023 will be for employees who stayed with the district through the semester the previous spring, according to an FAQ sent to teachers earlier this year. For those bonuses, staff can miss no more than five days each semester, according to that FAQ.

The Indianapolis Education Association, which has pushed for pandemic bonuses, praised the decision.

“After many conversations with the district, we are pleased to see the shift in policy to allow for retained teachers to receive the bonus monies awarded,” the union wrote on Twitter. “We argued from the start that a 2-day absent disqualification was unacceptable – this is major progress!”

Separately, the district is spending $1 million on virtual mental health therapy for staff and a pilot program in two schools that offers teachers more flexible work hours.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

NYC: What’s the No. 1 thing you’d like your school to provide this year?

2022-09-01T18:25:44+00:00

New York City public schools plan to welcome back roughly 900,000 students next week, marking the start of yet another critical year.

Many children continue to feel the academic and emotional toll from prolonged classroom closures and interruptions during the coronavirus pandemic. And the nation’s largest school system as a whole is continuing to grapple with declining enrollment, though it is also seeing an influx of thousands of asylum seekers, who may need intensive support.

Chalkbeat wants to hear from students, parents, and educators: What are you looking forward to this year? Are you concerned about the city’s budget cuts affecting your school? Do you think your school is offering enough mental health support?

This summer’s battle over school funding cuts, along with an ongoing lawsuit challenging the education department’s budget process, made planning more complicated for many principals — though perhaps not as difficult as the previous two years when they had to reconfigure so much of what teaching and learning looked like because of COVID guidance. Schools will drop most of the city’s COVID mitigations this year, ditching the daily health screeners and onsite PCR testing, along with previously dropped layers such as masking and quarantines.

The city is still planning to spend more than $1 billion in stimulus funding this year, but it remains to be seen how much of that will go directly to help students with tutoring programs or other ways to catch them up academically and socially. The education department already said it plans to scale back special education recovery services this fall.

In response to the plummeting math and reading scores — especially for the lowest performing students — from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose test is known as “the nation’s report card,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that schools should use their federal aid “even more effectively and expeditiously.” He cited strategies like high-dosage tutoring, after-school programs, and hiring more staff.

Meanwhile, budget cuts forced many New York City schools to excess educators, sending them to find positions elsewhere in the system.

Having trouble viewing this form? Go here.

Math and reading scores plummet on national test, erasing 20 years of progress

2022-09-01T04:01:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up to receive the latest in education news straight to your inbox.

In a grim sign of the pandemic’s impact, math and reading scores for 9-year-olds across the U.S. plummeted between 2020 and 2022.

The declines erase decades of academic progress. In two years, reading scores on a key national test dropped more sharply than they have in over 30 years, and math scores fell for the first time since the test began in the early 1970s.

Put another way: It’s as if 9-year-olds were performing at the same level in math as 9-year-olds did back in 1999, and at the same reading level as in 2004.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy Carr, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test. “The big takeaway is that there really are no increases in achievement in either of the subjects for any student group in this assessment — there were only declines or stagnant scores for the nation’s 9-year-olds.”

The scores, released Thursday, are the first nationally representative look at how students across the U.S. performed in math and reading just before the pandemic compared with this year. They come from a long-running version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test known as “the nation’s report card” that’s able to compare student achievement across decades.

The sample included nearly 15,000 9-year-olds from 410 schools, about two-thirds of whom were in fourth grade.

Carr said while her team usually shies away from ascribing a reason to score increases or decreases, it’s obvious in this case that the disruptions wrought by the pandemic were a major factor in the declines.

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group,” Carr told reporters on a Wednesday call. “No other factor could have had such a dramatic influence on student achievement in a relatively short period of time.”

The scores could influence how state and district officials choose to spend their remaining COVID relief dollars — and fuel debates about whether public schools are adequately serving students in a time of great need. Many school districts already are devoting chunks of federal money to academic recovery, but there’s little evidence so far showing what difference those efforts have made for struggling students.

“Supporting the academic recovery of lower-performing students should be a top priority for educators and policymakers nationwide,” Martin West, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the board that oversees the national test, said in a statement.

Federal education officials cautioned that these scores shouldn’t be used to penalize schools. Rather, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement, these results should spur states and schools to use their federal aid “even more effectively and expeditiously” on strategies like high-dosage tutoring, hiring more staff, and running after-school programs. High-poverty schools especially have an unprecedented amount of money at their disposal, but some have struggled to spend it.

The education department would be watching, Cardona said, to make sure schools are “directing the most resources towards students who fell furthest behind.”

Reading and math score declines were most severe among students who were performing at the lowest levels. That means kids who hadn’t yet mastered skills like addition and multiplication, or who were working on simple reading tasks, saw their scores fall the most.

The gap between higher- and lower-performing students was already growing before COVID hit, but federal officials say the pandemic appears to have exacerbated that divide.

“There is still a widening of the disparity between the top and the bottom performers, but in a different way,” Carr said. “Everyone is dropping. But the students at the bottom are dropping faster.”

Officials noted that when they asked students about the tools they had available to them during remote learning, higher-scoring students were more likely than their struggling peers to say a teacher was available to help them with their math or reading work every day or almost every day — a disparity that could have contributed to the growing divide.

There were some differences across subject areas. Declines in math were pervasive, but Black students saw a particularly sharp drop.

Reading scores dipped by similar amounts for white, Hispanic, and Black students. But reading scores held steady in city schools, rural schools, and for English learners. To Carr, those were the only bright spots in the data.

“The fact that reading achievement among students in cities held steady, when you consider the extreme crises that cities were dealing with during the pandemic, is especially significant,” she said.

Officials said while these scores are an important indicator of the pandemic’s effect on elementary schoolers, the data doesn’t offer any insight into how long it could take for students to rebound academically. That won’t be clear, Carr said, until there’s more district, state, and federal data to analyze.

Data gathered from other state and national tests this year show elementary-age students are starting to rebound in reading and math after students saw dips, or made less progress than usual, earlier in the pandemic. But by some measures, middle schoolers are recovering more slowly, or not at all — raising concerns about whether enough is being done to support older students, who have less time to catch up.

Schools have a tall order ahead this year: Academic recovery efforts have been hampered by a host of issues, including a rise in student absenteeism, staffing challenges, and growing student mental health needs. In some schools, educators are also contending with an uptick in behavioral challenges and classroom disruptions.

A trove of federal data slated for release in late October will shine more light on how older students are faring. That will include scores from fourth and eighth grade students across the U.S., in individual states, and in certain cities.

“I am a little worried,” Carr said. “It’s difficult to predict what the recovery will look like. We’ll just have to see.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

NYC principals ready for new year after summer budget ‘rollercoaster’

2022-08-31T21:36:26+00:00

New York City principals were caught in the middle of this summer’s political fight over school budget cuts, trying to navigate a financial maze as they prepare to open classrooms next week in the nation’s largest district.

A lawsuit challenging those budget cuts continues to wind through the courts, leaving many principals uncertain whether they’ll get more money this school year. While they welcome the possible influx of cash, not knowing how much they could get or if restrictions will be tied to those dollars also complicated their ability to plan.

“It feels like a lot of things are up in the air,” said Valerie Leak, principal of 75 Morton, a middle school in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, whose school saw a 35% cut in funds, totaling nearly $2 million, for hiring and planning. “It’s been quite a rollercoaster.”

Despite protests from educators and advocates, elected officials in June approved cuts to school budgets based on declining enrollment projections. Roughly three-quarters of the city’s schools saw their budgets shrink from the previous year, according to Comptroller Brad Lander, who calculated $372 million in cuts across all schools.

Then in July, two parents and two teachers filed a lawsuit against the city challenging the approval process for the cuts. A Manhattan judge ruled in their favor, and ordered Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council to redo the education department budget. In the meantime, the judge called for the city to fund schools at last fiscal year’s levels — roughly $1 billion more than planned for this year.

In yet another twist, an appeals court judge put that on hold until the court reviews the case on Sept. 29, which is three weeks after school starts.

Still, while the budget cuts have been tough on school communities, an “overwhelming majority” of principals are ready to open their buildings, said Mark Cannizzaro, the head of the principals union. For those who are not ready, the education department is providing “very prompt” help once the union flags it, he said.

“In the last two years with COVID and the pandemic and the craziness happening there, people literally were not ready to open their buildings,” Cannizzaro said. “This year I am hearing, although there are some challenges, the overwhelming majority of people are ready to open their buildings.”

A dizzying problem

On the school level, the cuts and legal battle have been dizzying for principals who have been trying to plan yet another academic year.

At 75 Morton, Leak is expecting 500 students, so she was “shocked” when she learned that the education department projected 381 students to enroll at her school in the fall. With more than a third of her budget slashed, she had to excess 13 staffers, meaning they would no longer work for or get paid by her school but could look for work elsewhere in the system while being paid by the city.

She let go of just half of those staffers while others left the school on their own accord.

Meanwhile, she appealed the education department’s budget based on its enrollment projections, checking in for nearly two months to see if it had been granted. Finally, she was able to secure funding in mid-August to hire four teachers. But the drawn-out process delayed her ability to post the job openings and made it harder to find candidates.

City officials said the ongoing lawsuit temporarily held up the appeals process, but the process was expedited in August.

“I wouldn’t have been able to start with a full staff if the appeal hadn’t gone through,” she said.

If the lawsuit results in more money, she also hopes to rehire a social worker and a counselor.

Parents are worried about losing those positions because they “want a lot of support” for their children, which Leak also wants, she said.

“It makes hiring tricky because you don’t wanna hire someone and say, ‘Oh, sorry, we no longer have the money for you,’” Leak said.

Enrollment loss snowball effect

With about 20% less funding at P.S. 503 in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, the principal, Nina Demos, cut three classes this fall and increased class sizes in some grades. Some extracurricular and enrichment activities also were in limbo.

Here were some of the complicated calculations Demos faced: In April, she made plans to hire a bilingual special education teacher and planned to cover that salary with separate funds from the education department. That funding, however, didn’t hit her budget until Tuesday, so she had to front the salary from COVID stimulus funds. (Originally reserved for “academic recovery” activities, such as tutoring, city officials are now allowing schools to use that money for teacher salaries.)

That left hardly any money in her budget for overtime costs used to pay teachers who oversee things like clubs or tutoring while she waited for the other funds to come through, she said.

Without the money in hand, Demos didn’t feel comfortable planning after-school programs or clubs, or even telling families about the possible options.

One parent left the school because of the uncertainty, enrolling in a nearby charter school, she said. If she had some more money on hand, she could have committed to run programs through at least the fall, she said.

“We’re in this situation because of register loss, but it further exacerbates register loss,” Demos said.

Demos now expects to use her newly freed up COVID relief funds for a limited number of clubs and other after-school programming and a Saturday academy.

Flexible stimulus funds are ‘welcome change’

One Queens principal, who asked not to be named, said the ability to use relief funding for teacher salaries was “a welcome change.” His school lost very little funding, but with dozens more students enrolled than projected, he wants to hire new staff.

He hopes that the relief funding can be used as a stopgap measure until this winter, when he’s banking on getting more money from the city because the school is enrolling more students than projected — known as the mid-year adjustment. When schools get those funds in the middle of the year, it’s usually too late to pay for the teachers.

One Manhattan elementary school principal may use all of her academic recovery dollars on a teacher instead of paying for extra services or tutoring, as she did last year. Her part-time English as a new language teacher retired and must be replaced, said the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

An education department budget staffer told her she had to use her academic recovery funds after she appealed for more funding.

A week out from the first day of school, the principal has been unable to find a replacement — and she isn’t sure it’s enough money to make a hire.

The principal saw her budget cut by about 25% and was forced to excess one of her few teachers of color because they were one of the newer staffers. That felt painful and at odds with the city’s rhetoric on hiring a more “diverse staff,” she said. Three-quarters of her teachers are white, even though more than 85% of her students are of color.

The principal also may not have enough funding to maintain a service they offered last year at the school, where 75% of students are living in poverty: paying teachers overtime to supervise children who need before-school care.

“I would have to limit the number of children we could have coming early,” the principal said. “That’s one thing we’re thinking a lot about.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

How New Jersey and Newark plan to beef up school security this academic year

2022-08-30T23:50:00+00:00

In an effort to keep students safe, New Jersey will direct $6.5 million to have school districts digitize building maps for use in emergency situations and Newark plans to hire more security guards, launch a new student identification system, and use updated software to track incidents.

The state and local efforts to ramp up school security come months after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Districts nationwide have invested significant portions of their budgets and federal relief funds to upgrade school security measures in the months prior to and following the massacre, as school shootings hit a 20-year high in the 2020-21 school year.

“Ensuring school safety is among my, and I think, our collective, most sacred obligations,” Gov. Phil Murphy said on Tuesday at a news conference the week before the new school year starts for most districts in the state. “An important part of school safety is ensuring that first responders have the tools they need to answer any emergency of any size and at any time.”

Money for the digital school mapping effort will come from the state’s American Rescue Plan funds, Murphy said. The announcement follows a directive from Murphy earlier this month for school districts to create threat assessment teams by next school year, who will be tasked with identifying students who might be a threat to school safety.

About half of all 3,000 public and private schools throughout the state have already created the digital school building blueprints, known as “Collaborative Response Graphics” and created by Hamilton company Critical Response Group.

The digital maps allow police to easily pinpoint key access points, stairwells, and other locations, which could be useful if, for example, a school is under threat of a shooting.

The funds for this initiative will be used to support the creation of the digital maps for the remaining 1,500 schools, Murphy said. The governor’s office did not share which school districts already have the digital building maps.

Critical Response Group, run by former and current members of New Jersey state and local police departments, has been providing the digital blueprint service to hundreds of schools across the country for years, according to trade magazine articles about the company.

Governors and school district leaders in other parts of the country have also been announcing plans to invest in digital school maps, including in Iowa and Virginia.

“When every second matters, the first and perhaps most important tool is the ability to know without delay not just where an emergency is within a building, but also the fastest and safest route to get there,” Murphy said at the news conference, which was held in the East Brook Middle School of Paramus.

The renderings combine aerial imagery, floor plans, and other features into a gridded graphic, which allows various agencies to better communicate on strategy both inside and outside of a building in emergency situations, the company says.

“I think it’s a pretty good strategy to have and a step in the right direction,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, in an interview on Tuesday. “But as we talk more about technology, we cannot dismiss the human element of this whole piece of school safety.”

Canady said he urges law enforcement and public safety officials to visit schools in their regions, getting familiar with the physical layout of the buildings and the people who run the schools.

“This cannot be overlooked, it’s critical and makes all the difference in the world,” Canady said.

He also suggests that while districts invest in upgraded technology and cameras, they should also consider basic maintenance of doors and reporting systems when there are malfunctions.

Last school year, Newark schools faced multiple bomb threats and saw an uptick of disruptive behavior.

Newark has earmarked $2.8 million from its second coronavirus federal relief package for security measures, including about 5,000 new security cameras, six new patrol cars for school safety officers, and equipment at high school entrances to scan students for contraband and weapons.

Some education experts are critical of districts using federal relief money for school security measures, arguing the money was intended to address academic recovery and mental health support after students experienced months of disrupted learning.

For the upcoming school year, the district’s Office of Safety has hired 40 permanent security guards and is looking to hire an additional 50 guards on a per diem basis, according to a board operation committee report.

At a school board meeting last week, Superintendent Roger León said there will also be a new student identification system.

The district will be using a newly upgraded command center in the Office of Safety this coming school year to monitor the district “with our remote surveillance system while dispatchers utilize our new incident tracking CAD (computer-aided dispatch) system,” the operation report stated.

“We will continue to resource all security staff with superior training for the ever changing security threats we face in public education,” the report said. “All implemented security upgrades will benefit NBOE students, staff, and community.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

New York schools see a big disconnect between spending and test scores. Why?

2022-08-26T11:00:00+00:00

This is the second in a two-part project on school funding. Read the first piece — focusing on national data on whether students in poverty receive adequate funding for their education — here.

New York state leads the country in spending on public schools, and it’s not particularly close. In 2020, the state spent over $25,000 per public school student, $4,000 more than its closest competition, Connecticut.

For many of the state’s elected officials, this first-in-the-nation status is a point of pride worth maintaining. The latest state budget, boasted Gov. Kathy Hochul, “includes historic investments that will make a difference in people’s lives now and for years to come, including a record investment in our public schools.”

But New York doesn’t lead the way in educational performance. On national math and reading tests, its students only score in the middle of the pack.

On their own, the middling scores don’t prove that New York’s high spending is ill-advised or failing to help students. The state might be doing far worse without it. Or the resources might be helping students in ways that aren’t captured on tests.

But as more and more research has shown that more money typically leads to better schools, New York’s outlier status amounts to a discomfiting puzzle — one that state leaders, education officials, and experts who study this issue can’t fully explain. Figuring out how money can best be used to help students is crucial right now, as officials in New York and across the U.S. have large sums of COVID relief money to spend and large gaps in student learning to close.

“We spend a lot of money in this state,” said Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor at Syracuse University who has studied New York schools. “The question we should be asking is, are we spending it in the best way to get the most for our kids?”

An Empire State gap between spending and test scores

A recent study asked a crucial but difficult-to-answer question: How much would every school district in the country need to spend to get students to average proficiency in reading and math?

Then it compared that number to what districts actually spend. In many places, particularly high-poverty areas, schools aren’t spending nearly enough, claimed the research, which was released by the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

Few New York districts had this problem, though.

Nearly every district in the state was spending enough to get adequate scores, according to the Shanker Institute study. In fact, most were spending far more.

Based on these spending levels, the researchers predict that most New York districts would perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and reading exams, while New York City would be above average for a large city.

In fact, students in the state as a whole performed at roughly the national average on federal exams taken in 2019. Students in New York City, the best-funded large district in the country, also scored at about the average for a large American city and below the overall national average.

The Shanker Institute study is an estimate taking into account a variety of important factors — including student poverty, the share of students with disabilities, and cost of living. But it doesn’t look at what happens when a school loses or gains money. That’s probably a better way of showing whether dollars improve schools, and recent national research taking this approach has generally shown that, yes, money does make a difference.

At least three studies looking at funding changes in certain New York districts have found that, too. “This money doesn’t seem to be wasted,” said Lucy Sorensen, a University at Albany researcher and author of two of the papers.

Still, Sorensen says she’s not sure why New York’s national scores aren’t higher. “I can’t answer the underlying puzzle,” she said.

Money could be buying improvements beyond test scores

New York officials say the Shanker Institute research puts too much emphasis on test scores, missing out on other ways the state’s spending benefits students.

“The authors do not recognize that multiple measures are needed to measure the effectiveness of educational programs and successfully prepare students for college, careers, and civic engagement,” said JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the state’s education department.

O’Hare, who declined to make someone available for an interview, did not provide any data to indicate that New York performs better using other metrics.

In fact, New York doesn’t excel on one obvious measure: high school graduation. The state’s graduation rate was actually slightly below the national average in 2019. These sorts of comparisons are tricky, though, because different states have different graduation standards. New York, unlike many others, has required students to pass a battery of exams to earn a diploma.

New York’s spending could be also buying other benefits: more extracurricular activities, school-based health services, new buildings, or a variety of non-academic classes.

Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami and lead author of the Shanker Institute report, acknowledged the limits of focusing on test scores. Schools spending more, he said, often “offer lots of different types of programs — more sports and arts,” he said. “That’s not picked up in the outcomes.”

It’s also possible data quirks in spending or student achievement might be skewing comparisons, Baker said. For instance, New York City students seem to perform relatively better on state exams than national tests.

Or perhaps there are unique factors in the state that make it harder to account for schools’ costs or student needs.

“The one-size-fits-all approach in this study doesn’t necessarily apply to New York State and in particular to New York City,” said Democratic state Sen. John Liu, who oversees the Senate’s committee on New York City education. He pointed to potentially higher transportation costs in the city.

Still, he said, “We should pay attention to the findings of this study and see what can be done to further improve educational outcomes.”

Segregation, spending choices could hurt New York test scores

Other potential explanations for New York’s less-than-stellar test scores are more concerning.

One possibility is that something about New York’s school system is pushing down scores. For instance, New York State schools are among the most racially segregated in the nation, which could be hurting students of color.

Some advocates also point to the state’s limited oversight of school curriculum. “Our policy landscape doesn’t really have strong policies that say math instruction must be [this], or reading instruction should look like [this],” said Dia Bryant, executive director at The Education Trust-New York, a group that focuses on the education of disadvantaged students.

Another explanation is simply that the state’s schools aren’t spending money as effectively as they could be.

Some research suggests that students in poverty are most likely to benefit from additional funding. But unlike many states, New York’s high-poverty districts don’t get meaningfully more money than their affluent counterparts. In fact, until recently, those better-off schools tended to get more funding.

The state’s particularly high-spending, affluent districts may feel less pressure to allocate money in a way that improves test scores. “The districts that tend to be most inefficient are small, wealthy, affluent suburbs,” said Baker. “Because they can.”

New York may also be investing in areas without a clear payoff in student learning. It’s one of the few states that requires all of its teachers to obtain master’s degrees, and districts typically boost pay once they do. But research has found only a tenuous link between master’s degrees and effectiveness in the classroom.

New York also spends larger sums than most other states on teacher benefits, including retirement. Teachers value these benefits, but some research suggests that money for base salaries may be more effective for recruiting teachers.

The list of potential explanations could go on.

“I don’t think we’ve done nearly enough work … digging into the particulars around differences in how dollars are spent and trying to tie that to outcomes,” said Josh McGee, an education researcher at the University of Arkansas.

That’s a problem in New York and elsewhere. Even researchers who have found that money matters for student learning agree that how it is spent matters, too. But there is little research-based guidance for educators about how to best spend additional funding, like the unprecedented sum of federal aid schools are now using to help students recover from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, New York advocates and officials are approaching the Shanker Institute study, as well as the broader questions about money and outcomes, gingerly.

“The report does point to things that we should be looking out for in both funding as well as the operation for school systems,” said Liu, even as he questioned some of its conclusions.

Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance For Quality Education, an education advocacy organization that has pushed for more school funding in New York, said this research shouldn’t dissuade policymakers from investing in high-poverty schools, particularly since the state’s highest spending districts are affluent ones.

“Are we spending the most on the students in the highest poverty areas? We are not. Are we spending most on the students with the greatest needs? We are not,” she said.

At the moment, New York lawmakers are continuing to pump money into its schools, recently agreeing to fully fund a formula that sends more money to high-needs schools.

They’re also pushing New York City to use its increased state funding to reduce class sizes — an investment with some much-debated research behind it — through a bill that hasn’t yet been signed by Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has opposed it.

“It’s not about just giving New York school districts a blank check — it’s also about making sure they adhere to basic standards that have been set forth,” Liu said of the bill. “The most basic of this standard is a sound, basic education, which includes class sizes and teacher quality.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

When students don’t show up, attendance detectives are on the case

2022-08-22T22:55:40+00:00

The front door of the house was ajar when Domanic Castillo and Julia Madera approached. They were looking for a teenager named Jason who’d missed the first five days of school at Northridge High in Greeley.

The boy wasn’t there, but his father was — dusty from working on renovations inside.

After Castillo explained that they hadn’t seen Jason at school yet, the man quickly dialed the boy’s mother and handed over his cell phone. Madera took the call and, speaking in Spanish, learned that the family planned to send him to one of the district’s alternative schools.

The father of a no-show student hands his phone to an attendance advocate from Northridge High School during a home visit so she can talk to the boy’s mother.

“She said she meant to call,” Madera said as she and Castillo returned to her SUV, ready for the next stop on their home visit list.

Castillo and Madera are on the front lines of a push to get kids back in school after a pandemic that compounded many of the problems that contribute to chronic absenteeism, including student disengagement, academic struggle, and financial insecurity. The rationale is simple: Students have to be in class to learn.

The Greeley-Evans district in northern Colorado is one of many districts nationwide using federal COVID dollars to fund attendance-boosting efforts. The 22,000-student district is in the second year of a three-year, $644,000 contract with the Denver-based consulting company Zero Dropouts to track down missing high schoolers and help them catch up on coursework or credits.

Castillo, the Northridge cheer coach, and Madera, a former secretary at the school, are among 14 Zero Dropouts employees, also known as attendance advocates, embedded in the district’s five high schools this year. They have a host of responsibilities, from helping out in classes and monitoring hallways to calling and visiting the homes of absent students.

The job is part detective work, part social work, and part paperwork.

Before the pandemic, 35% of Greeley-Evans students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of school days. That number rose to 40% during 2020-21, well above the state rate of 26%.

Lanny Hass, special projects manager at Zero Dropouts, said advocates help intervene quickly when warning signs pop up: an increase in absences, a grade that’s fallen to a D or F, or problematic behavior. The team works in tandem with counselors, mental health specialists, and other school staff.

During a home visit, Julia Madera, an attendance advocates from Northridge High School, talks by phone with the mother of a student who hasn’t shown up to school, as another advocate, Domanic Castillo, looks on.

“Attendance and course recovery are probably your two biggest challenges at a high school,” said Hass, who formerly served as a high school principal in nearby Loveland.

“The challenges are the same pre- post- and during the pandemic,” he said. “They’re just more pronounced now.”

No falling through the cracks

The four attendance advocates at Northridge High use a small room connected to the main office as their home base. It’s rimmed with computer workstations that often display color-coded spreadsheets showing period-by-period absences and other metrics that help them flag kids in danger of slipping away.

Along the wall is a cardboard box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie packs. Students zip into the room occasionally to grab a snack from the box.

On a recent morning, Erin Eckenrode, an advocate who previously worked as a juvenile probation officer, made phone calls looking for 54 students on that day’s no-show list. She talked to some parents, left messages for others, and sometimes hit dead ends.

She did solve a few mysteries. She found that two families had moved out of the district — one, refugees from Ukraine, had relocated to California, and another had moved to a nearby district.

Like high schoolers everywhere, Northridge students struggle for many reasons. They may find their classes boring, face chaotic home lives, or hold jobs that leave them too exhausted for school. About two-thirds of the school’s 1,200 students are eligible for federally subsidized meals, a measure of poverty.

“We have students here that work at the meat factory,” Eckenrode said. “They come to school and then they go home and sleep from four to eight and then they work the overnight shift cleaning the meat plant.”

A Northridge High School student works on course recovery through the online platform Edgenuity.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, operates a plant in Greeley.

Attendance advocates say the pandemic has also eroded students’ social and self-advocacy skills. Teens are dialed into the digital world, but can be muted when it comes to real-life interactions.

Castillo, who helps monitor a class where students work online to catch up, said he’s seen students stare at a locked computer screen rather than raising their hands to ask for help.

“I just stopped going”

Last year, Angel, now a 10th grader at Northridge, missed lots of school — more than 300 class periods last time he checked.

Some of his friends had already dropped out, joining their fathers on construction jobs.

“I started ditching a lot towards the end,” he said. “Sometimes, I just feel school ain’t for me so I just stopped going.”

But Angel eventually came back, and he counts Shena Lopez, one of the school’s attendance advocates, as someone he can relate to at Northridge. Often, he’ll stop by to see her three times a day.

“We’ll just have a good conversation about my day or her day,” he said. “She’s nice to me, so I really like her.”

Connecting with kids in a non-teaching role creates a different relationship, said Lopez.

“It’s different work. We’re their friends. We’re here for them,” she said. “I always tell them I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you succeed.”

Sometimes, the moments that mean the most aren’t what attendance advocates expect.

When a girl named LaWren, a senior cheerleader, recently stopped by, she mentioned how surprised she was when Eckenrode pronounced her name right on the first try during an advisory class.

“Wow, you remembered that?” Eckenrode asked.

“That was like a life-changing moment,” LaWren said. “That’s the first time someone’s gotten my name right in my whole life, my whole 17 years.”

When calls and visits fail

Even when attendance advocates track students down, it can be difficult to get them back in class. Madera recalled one student she worked with last year who stopped coming to school completely after a couple months, his absences a long red stripe on his attendance chart.

Julia Madera and Domanic Castillo, attendance advocates from Northridge High School, approach the home of three high school students who missed the first five days of school

The 10th grader didn’t seem to want to go to Northridge or anywhere else. When she dropped off an application for an online program, he threw the papers on the floor. She ended up calling the family more than 20 times, visiting their home four times, and texting the boy’s mother a few times.

Nothing changed until she referred the teen to truancy court.

“I didn’t want it to be like that,” said Madera.

But the move worked, and the teen returned to Northridge last April — at first shy, with his hood pulled over his head. He attended consistently for the last two months and made up some of his missed work. This year, Madera spotted him on the first day of school, Aug. 11.

“Oh my God, he’s here,” she thought.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

NYC brings camp to the classroom in Summer Rising

2022-08-18T21:05:57+00:00

Summer Rising, New York City’s massive effort to rebrand summer school as something fun and educational, has a lesson for the regular school year: Children really like outdoor and hands-on activities.

One 7-year-old’s favorite thing was a trip to a bouncy house, while another loved having a barbecue. One 10-year-old was excited to learn how to jump rope for double Dutch; another enjoyed playing hide-and-seek, running through the hallways, ducking into classrooms. Painting, drawing, and bracelet-making were high on the list, according to students at several Summer Rising sites in Brooklyn. (Though bracelet-making also had its detractors.) Playing games on computers or classroom smartboards also got top marks.

The city offered 110,000 spots for elementary and middle school students in its $350 million Summer Rising program, up from last year’s 98,000. Propped up by federal dollars, it is the second year in a row that New York City offered the program free to any student, not just those who needed academic help.

Last summer, the program, which combines academics and enrichments, was seen as a crucial bridge into the new school year for students who had been out of classrooms for prolonged periods due to the pandemic. This summer, seats were snatched up days after applications opened. Education department officials said they are working with the Adams administration and City Council in hopes of continuing the program. Educators see it as an important defense against “summer slide,” when students regress academically during the break.

Nationwide, summer programs were bolstered through the Biden administration’s federal relief funds, setting aside $122 billion to school districts through the 2024-25 school year to help with reopening campuses and aiding academic recovery. An analysis from Future Ed estimated that districts will spend more than $6 billion of that money on summer and after-school programs.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visits P.S. 7 in Queens on Aug. 16.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who visited P.S. 7 in Queens this week to see Summer Rising in action, lauded the program as a way to continue to help children reacclimate to the classroom.

“They’re ready for the school year. They’re full of confidence,” he said of the students in the program. “They have more social skills.”

He also touted how schools were working with community-based organizations, with teachers mainly responsible for the academic portion in the morning, and staffers from community organizations leading the afternoon activities such as trips, art activities, and backyard games.

‘We’re better prepared’

Lovanna Abbott, a site director for the Coalition For Hispanic Family Services, which partnered with P.S. 7, said her team focused on the arts and literacy this summer through its theme, “Around the World in 34 days.” The children have been learning about different cultures and countries, channeling their newfound knowledge into artwork posted around the school.

“They had their own little passports, so they can see where they’ve gone and what they’ve learned about,” Abbott said.

Compared to last summer’s rocky rollout, she felt that things went more smoothly this year though others reported some initial snafus.

“We’re better prepared. The teachers have more support,” Abbott said. “We know what we need to get for the students.”

In response to feedback from families, this year’s enrollment systems prioritized students in temporary housing and students with disabilities, officials said. More than 11,000 students in temporary housing and over 32,000 students with disabilities signed up for the program.

But for some of these students, who required transportation, issues remained. The education department provided yellow school buses for students with disabilities and children living in shelters, but buses were not available after 3 p.m. even though enrichment programming runs until 6 p.m., and only until Aug. 12, before this week’s enrichment-only days.

The city provided prepaid ride-sharing services for the home trip after the enrichment program, but parents had to accompany their children. Though the city covered the roundtrip for parents, it could still be a struggle for them time-wise. As of last week, Summer Rising families took roughly 7,000 prepaid rides, officials said.

“Students living in shelter and students with disabilities who rely on bus service shouldn’t have to leave the program hours earlier than their peers,” said Randi Levine, from Advocates for Children.

Parents reported some other bumps. Janet Agard, who on Thursday morning dropped off her 6-year-old granddaughter, at P.S. 235 in East Flatbush, said some trips were canceled because of lack of busing, and one swim trip was nixed because the pool had no lifeguards.

But overall, many families were elated to send their children to the free program.

“I really sincerely feel like kids lose a lot over the summer,” said Brooklyn mom Jamie Braden. “And teachers spend time just trying to get them back up to speed. So kids who have been academically motivated during the summer, either maintain what they had or gain a little, and nothing is lost, which I feel is really important.”

Kids sound off

Amirah Young, 7, who is entering second grade next month at P.S. 81 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was a bit nervous to attend the program. Now, she can rattle off her summer’s highlights: getting wet at the park down the street, making the bracelet now on her wrist, drawing, watching a movie, and having an ice cream party.

“I feel excited, happy and brave,” she said, “because at the beginning I was scared, but I started to get braver.”

Mia Mitchell, 10, attended Summer Rising at P.S. 282 in Park Slope.

Mia Mitchell, a 10–year-old going into sixth grade, lucked out by having her same teacher from the past year for summer school at P.S. 282 in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. In the morning, she and her peers would start off writing in their journals before doing reading and math. Then they would continue learning outside before lunch before doing other outdoor activities like double Dutch.

Her least favorite thing was having to go back inside for rain or other reasons.

“I liked being outside,” she said.

Seven-year-old Zayd Olivera, a rising third grader at P.S. 235, liked that Summer Rising had no homework and was happiest when visiting a bouncy house with the program.

But Zayd admitted he would rather be spending his days playing the popular video game Fortnite.

“I don’t like school in general,” Zayd said.

Six-year-old Christian Garrison attended Summer Rising at P.S. 81.

Other students seemed ready for the school year to start on Sept. 8. Six-year-old Christian Garrison said he was feeling “good” about entering second grade at P.S. 81 after making some headway on beginner books.

“Then, I can learn how to read,” Garrison said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Technology, Skyline rollout dominate Chicago Public Schools’ federal relief vendor spending

2022-08-11T15:59:21+00:00

Technology companies and curriculum consultants received nearly half of the federal stimulus money Chicago Public Schools has spent so far on outside vendors, according to purchase order data obtained by Chalkbeat.

Almost a quarter went to five companies helping the district roll out Skyline, a new curriculum schools can choose to adopt and one of former CEO Janice Jackson’s signature initiatives. Nearly a fifth of the spending went to CDW and Apple, the district’s main computer vendors.

The amounts are still a small fraction of the $2.5 billion Chicago schools got from the federal government’s two latest stimulus packages for schools. The $156.6 million spent on almost 1,000 outside vendors so far accounts for about 6% of the funding from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER — an unprecedented infusion of federal dollars aimed at helping students bounce back from the pandemic’s massive academic and mental health fallout.

Chicago has so far spent the bulk of its COVID relief money on salaries and benefits, mostly for positions that existed before the pandemic hit. The district is an outlier, particularly among high-poverty districts, in how much of its COVID relief dollars has covered staffing costs: Out of about $871.9 million in spending the district reported to the state in early July, more than 85% went to pay and benefits — compared to 27% on average for other Illinois districts. Chicago officials have said this spending has allowed the district to retain employees even as it lost enrollment.

The data, which includes some open purchase orders that have not yet been paid out, covers only spending on district-run campuses. The district has passed on about $38.5 million to charter and contract schools as required by law, but it was unable to provide more detailed data on how they spent the money.

The district also said it recently reclassified some vendor expenses previously paid with other dollars to cover them with COVID relief funds, so they are not included in the purchase order data it provided earlier this summer.

It’s hard to put Chicago’s COVID relief spending on outside vendors into national context because relatively little detailed data from other districts is available, said Bree Dusseault of the nonprofit Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“We want to see districts invest in at least something new and different to disrupt an inequitable school system, which wasn’t designed to recover well,” Dusseault said. “They should be investing in new approaches.”

In Chicago, a large chunk of the money is going to longstanding vendors or to initiatives that were already in the works when the pandemic hit, such as the Skyline curriculum. The district has also brought in new partners to provide student mental health support and other services, including a collaboration with Lurie Children’s Hospital to expand behavioral health teams in schools. The data indicates the hospital has gotten a little more than $250,000.

Dusseault stressed the importance of using the money to support and keep staff, many of whom are leaving after two difficult years of pandemic disruption. She said unveiling a high-quality curriculum could be a powerful tool to help schools bounce back from the pandemic’s academic damage, as long as it is coupled with teacher training and ongoing support.

The district said in a statement that it works to spend the federal dollars “thoughtfully and deliberately.”

All in all, about 20 large vendors account for the bulk of the spending, or more than $105 million, with schools across the city engaging other companies and organizations on a much smaller scale, sometimes to provide arts and enrichment activities for students. In addition to technology and Skyline, COVID-related expenses – for masks and school care room attendants – also figure prominently in the district’s outside federal relief spending.

Here are the top 10 vendors that have gotten COVID relief money from Chicago Public Schools so far:

(Can’t see the list? View the graphic directly.)

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.